On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 11:57:40AM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: > On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 10:38:49AM +0200, Daniel Kobras wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 09:52:28AM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote: > > > I really feel we should get rid of all these static libraries. Who uses > > > static linking now that even our glibc doesn't support it correctly > > > across versions? > > > > People who want their binaries to run across different Linux machines. > > Dynamic linking to an old version of glibc is more portable than > statically linking to any version. Exhibit A is NSS; exhibit B is > iconv. Neither works properly when statically linked unless run > against the exact same glibc version.
The sentence I refer to reads: 'I really feel we should get rid of all these static libraries.' _All_ static libraries. glibc is quite special in this regard because it's likely to be present even on a minimalist system. > > People who need to minimize startup times. > > Static linking does _not_ minimize startup times; in fact it's quite > inefficient. Dynamic linking + prelinking is much faster if you care > about startup times. Prelinking is also quite recent and not yet available on any platform as far as I know. Are you claiming that startup performance of statically linked objects is equal to shared objects even without prelink? Daniel.
