kohlrak: That, and dynamic linking is one of those ideas that's really, really good in theory, but the deprecation hell we're seeing since the common adoption of java has made it almost like developing for DOS. The reason these runtimes are distributed is because, well, if you don't, you could actually run into a system that doesn't have them. Especialyl with systems like windows that don't have dependency management. Due to all this hell, i've largely abandoned C++ development and moved to C. Coding things from scratch or almost from scratch is far, far easier and more reliable than hoping to God crucial parts of my program aren't deprecated before i'm even done making it (especially if i don't develop full-time). I keep running into devs with similar opinions (minus the C). I've recently started coaching someone in C as a solution to their web-development problem (they feel they have to constantly keep learning the new technologies, so I have them learning how to make CGI bins and i'm considering making my own language like PHP, except with alot less going on since, well, really all anyone wants, it seems, is input sanitization and some common features like logins and databae management. In about an hour or two i imanaged to develop a simple proof of concept sample: takes a script in and identifies and outputs all commands while ignoring things that aren't between "<?" and ">". I thought about something like dbquery blog_entries "title","id","body" "<a href='/showblog.ks?id=$2'>$1</a><br>$3<br><br>"; to show a blog for example. The comma separated list is used to pull from a table called "blog_entries" and correspodns to the numbers in the 3rd string, which gets executed in a for-each like format.
Seems I missed this discussion when it was originally happening. (I wish the topic had been somehow marked as having this sort of discussion.)
For the web development case, for the client side, one solution is to use plain JavaScript, without using any libraries. (Of course, if what you want to do can be reasonably done with just HTML, you should do that and dispense with the JavaScript entirely.) This avoids the dependency issues entirely, and also means that the client won't need to download nearly as much code.
MysterD: Question: will things like DGVoodoo, DXVK, and other DX-wrapper still make games using older DX versions work, if you don't install say DX9.0?
Don't know the direct answer to this question.
However, apparently with Windows 11, you can use WSLg to run Linux graphical applications, and that might make it possible to run WINE on such a system, which can be useful for games that are too old to run natively on Windows 11.
(By the way, does anyone have a rundown of the different DirectX versions, and in particular, what the difference between DirectX 6 and DirectX 7 is?)