David Burrows <snadge@gemcorp.com.au> wrote:
> Oh, so you like bloated binaries which waste vast quantities of ram and
> hard disk space?  I'd like to hear a good reason why.  Shared libraries
> are an infinitely useful feature.  And lumping in fat static libs to
> every executable on your hard disk is rather inefficient, regardless of
> whatever argument you might have against shared libs.
   
   Note Andy Sporner's reply:
> There is a good reason for static libraries and I am saddle sore from
> having to deal with that particular issue.  When you are doing software
> for an operating system that manages to change a lot, you have to be
> concerned with versions of shared libraries.
   
   Certainly shared libs are a nice idea in theory, but oftentimes the
practical problems with implementing them outweigh their advantages.
Supporting shared libs means introducing a kludge into the kernel, the
compiling/linking tools, and probably other things. It means getting bogged
down in versions, search paths, etc. It's just that the headache (or pain
in the <bodypart>, depending on how you view it) associated with shared
libs outweighs their benefits, IMHO.
   
   As for wasting vast quantities of RAM and disk space, note that the
complete set of 4.3BSD VAX binaries is a little under 50 MB and runs on a
VAX with as little as 2 MB of RAM. Compare this with Win95... The latter
has shared libs, called DLLs. :-)
   
   Sincerely,
   Michael Sokolov
   Phone: 440-449-0299
   ARPA Internet SMTP mail: sokolov@alpha.ces.cwru.edu