this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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My distro is based on MUSL. I seem to remember finding something that would not build on it but I do not recall what that is. In addition to the thousands of packages I am using, I have compiled hundreds of applications. Compatibility is very high.
Certainly it is clear the “most applications” work with MUSL.
That is, the source code does.
gcompat is when you want to run something that is already a binary that wants to call into Glibc. I try to avoid that so I cannot comment much.
There is the odd time I have had a binary built for Glibc that I could not avoid. For example, bootstrapping .NET or the version of vcpkg that the Ladybird browser uses in its build system. To be honest, in those cases, I just reach for Distrobox and drop into a distro that has Glibc natively, like Arch. Or I might use a RHEL Distrobox for a commercial binary meant to target that distro.
Clearly running a binary without one of the dependencies it was built against is a problem no matter what library you are taking about. But if we are just asking what works on MUSL, I would say almost everything.
Google Crashpad is used for crash reporting by some program, and it can't be built with musl. It also does not build in FreeBSD, and I suspect it only works with glibc outside of Mac OS, Windows, and Android.
I don’t use Google Crashpad but when did you last try it.
I just read a bug report that says it fixed building on MUSL in 2023. The fix was to comment out a reference to user_vfp in thread_info.h and to put the change in an #ifdef.
I assume this is in the mainline by now.
I think it was around the same time when I disabled it altogether in the Makefiles of some software. Let's hope it's upstream now.
Ironically, the bug report I read was originally filed for Android as crashpad did not built with bionic either (bionic being the C library on Android).
Glibc is the most popular C library on Linux but also the most non-standard.