Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > What's wrong with static linking? At least it goes away when the > application goes away.
Completely infeasible on Windows. The loss of shared text would make the working set of the typical application mix grossly exceed even the absurd amounts of RAM available in typical machines today. The disk space problem would be even worse. Many people have done back-of-the-envelope calculations to demonstrate this; I think I did some myself, in a post to alt.folklore.computers some time back. It's a lousy idea in any case, as anyone who remembers compiling all of BSD 4.2 to switch from local-files resolution to DNS remembers. Dynamic linking lets you fix the bug or add the feature in one place. We can't have millions of Windows users downloading a refresh of the entire OS every time a bug is fixed in one of the prominent DLLs. Dynamic linking is a good thing. It's worked very well on a number of OSes. It would work on Windows if Microsoft could figure out 1) how to version properly, and 2) how to maintain backward compatibility. And it's not like those are unsolved problems. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
