Setting Up a Software Development Environment on Alpine Linux

Originally designed for routers, it is a secure, fast, feather-light Linux: a basic Alpine base image takes as little as 5 MB, orders of magnitude less than other popular Linux distros (Ubuntu is 188 MB, for comparison). Almost any Linux program is dynamically linked with libc, and while glibc Linux binaries will link against libc.so, Alpine binaries will link against musl.so. Consequently, Linux executables that were built on glibc distros such as Ubuntu and RedHat, will not be able to run on Alpine, at least not out of the box.

Source: blog.overops.com