Shared libraries (was Re: Window system bashing (was Re: X11 bashing))

[Larry McVoy]

mjr at hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) writes:
> 	I was talking this over with someone the other day who claimed
> that SunOs' more recent versions have "often used" utilities like /bin/ls
> statically linked because there were complaints of performance hits -
> can anyone confirm or deny this? 

$ ldd /bin/ls
	-lc.1 => /usr/lib/libc.so.1.5
$ cat /etc/motd
SunOS Release 4.1.1 (SLOVAX) #20: Thu May 9 17:19:32 PDT 1991

I build the entire system now and again and I know of no program that
is statically linked other than those that must be (during boot; it's a
bummer if init is dynamically linked :-)

This doesn't mean that some things won't benefit from static linking.
The amount of overhead due to shared libraries strikes me as almost all
start up overhead.  The only programs that I'd think worth it are
things like /bin/echo; almost all of its running time is start up.

> Is "ldconfig" or whatever it's called still a dynamically linked file?]

$ ldd /usr/etc/ldconfig
	-lc.1 => /usr/lib/libc.so.1.5
---
Larry McVoy, Sun Microsystems     (415) 336-7627       ...!sun!lm or lm at sun.com