Looks at raspberry pi zero doing cool shit with 512mb of ram...

Looks at ESP32's all over house.

I think what the author means is that 90 percent of devs wont know how to use it because it cant run the docker container with their code in it.

With 4GB of storage and 512MB of RAM, it's quite possible that somebody can run their docker container in it.

I mean yea...

But most containers are doing an admirable job of containing shit... they let software run and not fuck up the underlying OS.

If you have to use a container it's a statement about the software in it more than anything else. And that isnt gonna run on 512mb...

Modern containers have only a single static binary inside and run with identical performance to that same binary running uncontained.

Let's grab a pizero w, put linux on it.

Hdmi screen, rotary encoder, 2 buttons.

For the majority of devs out there, they would struggle to build something that runs on this platform without paging. It's not in their wheelhouse.

Most modern containers are a run time + a pile of other code (js/ruby/python/java)... So no, not just a single binary.

And even if you want to make the argument that you can compile all those down to a single binary... I would point out that you're going to run into their limitations around file system access, and c binding (to access local GPIO pins). Again you can over come these things, but you're likely going to have to do that on the underlying os, probably with some C...

If you dont compile down to a single binary, you have the FS access, and can install the c-dependancys in your container and everything just works.

The container is then doing its job. It's a bag separating all that stuff from spilling all over the OS it lives on and the env vars it creates. It does it well. It's why we use them.

If we could run single binary blobs, the use case for containers (for deployment) shrinks drastically... Isolating 2 version of an app with some networking for fast switching, and cgroups make sense on the server side. Less so on end user machines.

Writing portable, and installable software is a hard problem. Containers are an abstraction of those issues. I no longer believe that they are a good one.