On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 10:12:42AM -0600, Tim Uckun wrote: > Shared libraries may have been a good idea but somehow the implementation > in both windows and linux got all weird. I just did a search for *.dll on > my windows 2K system and it came back with 4,303 files.
Doesn't win2k do what you suggest, and have a the dlls for each app in a directory for that app? > How much you want > to bet half of them have a function to split strings into parts. If the > goal of the DLLs was to encourage code reuse it failed, if it was to save > disk space it also failed. I think statically linking everything is a crappy idea. With shared libraries, two processes that have the same library mapped can share that memory, and instruction cache, space. It not only saves disk space, it also makes things run faster. Especially with the Unix paradigm of having lots of small programs that all do one thing well, you'd have a ridiculous amount of memory usage. Think about the extra IO traffic from loading a statically linked ls, cat, rm, cp, etc. all the time. Also, if there's a bug in shared library code, you have to upgrade every application statically linked against it instead of just upgrading the shared library. Same deal for optimizations, like a 3dnow or altivec libjpeg or something. And BTW, installing stuff in Debian won't break other packages, unless one package lists the other in its Conflicts: line. If so, apt won't let you install both at once. That's not so bad. You can tell apt to download source, build the package, and install it for you if you don't have the lib versions it was compiled against. -- #define X(x,y) x##y Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X([EMAIL PROTECTED] , ns.ca) "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
