Shared libraries are not necessary

Marcus J. Ranum mjr at hussar.dco.dec.com
Fri May 17 03:33:05 AEST 1991


sef at kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:

[Re: space savings of shared libraries]
>>	1) its space saving is negligible
>
>[....]  It can easily amount to *many* megabytes, with X11,
>toolkits, and the like.  *Each* X application gets many, many Kbytes' worth
>of code; putting this in a shared library greatly reduces amount of disk
>space.

	Heaving X windows out or putting it on a diet would *REALLY* reduce
the amount of required disk space. To forestall flamage about all of X'
vaunted "functionality" take a look at the size of MGR and the "functionality"
it offers before you follow-up, please.

	Using shared libraries to cure X-windows bloat is really stupid, if
you consider that you'll further slow stuff down (depending on the shlib
implementation) and you'll still have X slowing your system down, and it'll
take a huge amount of effort to get the shared libs *right* - effort that
could be spent on a smaller more efficient user interface, if that is what
you need.

mjr.



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