Re: dynamic linking

Laurent G. Bercot writes:
> From what I understand, the main problem is that not all linkers will
> let you specify full paths to shared libraries at link time.

All systems let you specify full paths to open(). ``Back in the old
days, we had to write our own loaders...''

Here's the real question: What exactly is the value of shared libraries?
Has anyone done a study of the actual memory saved on a typical system?
Could a better mechanism achieve the same benefits without the costs?

If practically all of the benefit comes from sharing the X libraries,
for example, then (1) there's no reason to worry about other libraries,
and (2) we should start looking at better window-system architectures
that don't need gigantic libraries inside every application.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago