libphobos.so libdruntime.so

[Marco Leise]

Am 03.02.2012, 04:42 Uhr, schrieb Adam D. Ruppe  
<destructionator at gmail.com>:

> On Friday, 3 February 2012 at 03:40:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Dynamic linking is evil.
>
> Amen!
>
>> dynamic linking for a variety of reasons (saving memory being one of  
>> them).
>
> Smart operating systems don't even need it for this;
> they can do de-duplication of identical pages in both
> memory and on the drive.

Are you serious? I have seen a flag in Linux for hosting virtual machines,  
but it must be an enormous overhead to check every executable page or  
every executable file on the file system for duplicates. If this were for  
free, it would be great, but the most spread OSes today and in the  
foreseeable future wont have filesystems that do something like automatic  
hardlinks of duplicate pages in executables. Both the file system and more  
importantly executable formats aren't ready for this. Let's imagine the  
library to link against against was Gtk. Would you want every binary  
download on the internet to include libraries of that size?
The best we have for the job is dynamic linking. Personally I think it is  
quite good, but you have to be careful as a library author to properly  
version API differences.