I took the applications I am interested in. After reading your message, out of curiosity I tried xiterm-1.0 (international xterm from an older suse distro which includes a sunsite mirror) and compiled static and dynamic executables. Indeed the static one turns out to be much larger than the dynamic one (780 vs. 68 kbyte ; didn't you forget to strip your executables ?). This is normal for an application like xterm which is small by itself and relies heavily on the subroutines taken from outside. However the size consideration is only relevant for the room on hard disk (which did not explode here under the weight of the additional 700 kbytes); when actually loaded in RAM, the program should take approximately the same room in RAM - the static version being favored since it has less overhead. To check this in the case under discussion, I looked at the output of free: used free shared no xiterm 110800 17024 33300 xiterm-static 111852 15972 34736 xiterm-dynamic 111976 15848 35180 I think this proves my point. Concerning the stuff about Microsoft etc: I don't intend to harm any one person in particular with my thoughts on static vs. dynamic linking, however, it seems to me that commercial considerations are indeed among the "other reasons". What do you think ? Statically yours, Andrei On Wed, Jun 28, 2000 at 09:03:55AM -0600, David Porter wrote:
You were lucky in your choice. For example, an unshared version of xterm has copies of the X libraries linked into it, and is 1411KB in size. The shared version is only 155KB in size! That is over 9 times larger. Explode indeed.
Dynamically yours,
david.
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