actually, in this case it totally makes sense. the issue is that alpine uses musl, and many things only compile for glibc. if you're writing in any of those languages, chances are you're going to install a library that requires some c compilation (yaml parsing, database libraries, numeric processing, etc) and this becomes an issue
*edit: which is what you were saying all along, and this didn't sound enough like "yes I agree"
Have you had trouble with any specific libraries? We're using alpine-based images with statically-linked binaries and haven't had any issues compiling third-party libs. One area you're likely to run into trouble is RPC, but I only discovered that in messing about with something experimental.
Yes, I found out Rails containers were problematic with Alpine because therubyracer would segfault when run under musl. It appeared to be a known issue at the time, though I haven't looked into whether it's fixed.
Go has official images based both on alpine and wheezy, so you can choose https://hub.docker.com/_/golang/ in case you have issues with C extensions. Most upstream projects are happy to take patches to work with Musl, and with docker it is much easier to replicate issues than it used to be when you had to install the distro.
yeah totally. my rule of thumb is that if it's got c extensions, Debian is fine. if it's compiled, you'll be doing that outside your container anyway (because who wants gcc in prod aye?) so you may as well copy your 20kb binary into alpine rather than Debian
*edit: which is what you were saying all along, and this didn't sound enough like "yes I agree"