VEvezzy-fnord·Jun 27, 2015
The more awareness musl gets, the better. See also Sabotage Linux, a musl-based distro: https://github.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage
In How to compile C apps with musl and Clangsabotage-linux
sabotage
Shell2014–2015
sabotage-linux / sabotage
sabotage
a radical and experimental distribution based on musl libc and busybox
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
579GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
a radical and experimental distribution based on musl libc and busybox
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-03-20 09:50:05 UTC to 2015-06-27 22:54:23 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 2014 | 2014-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Apr 2014 | 2014-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2014 | 2014-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2014 | 2014-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2014 | 2014-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2014 | 2014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2014 | 2014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2014 | 2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2014 | 2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2014 | 2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Jan 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2015 | 2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2015 | 2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2015 | 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2015 | 2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2015 | 2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesA similarly interesting project is the musl-based Sabotage Linux with its own tiny but concurrent package manager: https://github.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage
In Static LinuxI have been using Musl for various purposes for quite some time. I think my favourite things are:
* The team are very helpful, and fix things fast and correctly. You can see some of the detail in this post on race conditions in glibc http://ewontfix.com/16/
* It is very standards compliant, so it is a good portability test for your code. It is a bit like using a BSD libc, except it does have Linux specific syscalls etc.
* Static linking works, which it doesnt properly in glibc. If you want to be like those trendy Go people and provide simple statically linked single file binaries, for running in containers etc then you can. And they will be small: the glibc shared library is 1.8MB (not including rt, pthread etc), while a Musl statically linked copy of Lua for example is only 160k. Static linking is very useful for all sorts of things, my
Read the rest
most recent use was cross compiling bianries to run under qemu-user for testing.
* It is BSD licensed so you can use it in completely different projects however you want, eg OSv uses it http://osv.io/
* The code is small and readable. If you want to know how things work you can just take a look, quickly find the code and understand it. Just finding the code in glibc takes ages. I keep a reference copy just for this purpose.
You can use the "cross compiler" musl-gcc that ships with it to build if your code is happy being cross compiled (should be, most things just work). If you have a lot of dependencies it might be easier to use a distro, I use Sabotage in a chroot usually https://github.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage