On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 07:16, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A thought ... > > Shared libraries do 2 possibly useful things: > 1) save space > 2) stop you having to re-link when a new library is released.
i can see how relinks are painful with gnu-style build systems where you need to run ./configure and recurse thru endless Makefiles. but under the much cleaner plan 9 source tree, such things take seconds. plan 9 doesn't really have that many libraries either. my (probably naïve) impression is that much of what can be done with dynamically linked libraries can be done with pipes or layered filesystems also linking at loadtime or runtime slows things down. you might not notice interactively, but in shell scripts you certainly would. that is one of the reasons why the unix world uses shell scripts to a lesser extent. there are other advantages to static linking, but they slip my mind for now losing the advantages of static linking in order to duplicate functionality that can be gotten from pipes and filesystems doesn't seem like such a good tradeoff to me -- m
