printf(3) as a system call - Uck!

[utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!ariel!houti!hogpc!houxm!houxz!hocda!spanky!ka]

When Stehpen Hemminger talked about DEC putting everything into the kernel
he was probably talking about TOP-10 and TOPS-20.  The issue here seems
to be one of performance rather than functionality anyway, and the compar-
isons of UNIX vs. VMS performance that I have seen didn't consider the
issue important enough to discuss.  With shared libraries, you have tran-
fer vectors which make calling the routines slower, and the operating
system has to set up page table entries for routines which your program
doesn't ever call.  These problems may be enough to offset the performance
advantages of shared libraries.
				Kenneth Almquist