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

[Peter Eriksson]

jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:

>In article <97 at titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp>, mohta at necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) writes:

(some discussion about windows vs text terminals deleted)

>|> Shared library is NO solution. It only moves complexity, unstability
>|> and ineffeciency of X to UNIX.

>This, too, strikes me as an unnecessarily broad statement with little basis in
>fact.

>X isn't the only thing that uses libraries, and X isn't the only thing that
>benefits from shared libraries.  It is my impression that the Unix industry
>has, in general, come to agreement on the idea that shared libraries are a
>good thing, simply because they make more memory available to the user while
>having little or no negative side-effects.

I would even go as far as saying that they mostly have positive side-effects.
That way bug-fixes in the libraries can be introduced and automatically be
in effect in all the programs that use those libraries. No need to recompile
all zillions small and big programs.

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