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From: moroz@inist.ru (Oleg Moroz)
Subject: Re: Shared libraries are the problem, not the solution (was Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation)
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Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 19:43:47 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:22633 comp.lang.scheme:16789

On 09 Sep 1996 11:52:29 -0400, schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
wrote:

>| But C programs do this now.  As far as I can see *everything* on Suns
>| (solaris 2.5) is linked with 750k of shared library, and anything that
>| does networking is 2meg and stuff that talks to X is 3 up.  Lisp is
>| bigger still, but not *that* much bigger. (And of course, these vast C
>| programs don't perform that well either).
>
>*Some* C programs do this now.  Just because Solaris comes with a
>bunch of bloated code doesn't make it good practice.  "Not only is
>unix dead, it's starting to smell bad" -- Rob Pike.

All of the Windows software (I won't cite the percentage :-)) uses DLLs if only
to use the system API. Windows/Win32 itself is not much more than a relatively
small (and mostly inaccessible from user-level programs) kernel plus many DLLs
that implement the functionality. The current state-of-things (as Microsoft
tells us developers) is to link with MSVCRT.DLL (which is C runtime library) and
MFC42.DLL (which is MFC DLL).

As for the pros and contras of using DLLs, I see much more pros (smaller
distribution size when you have many executables using one or more common DLLs,
ability to load them at run-time, suitability for delivering binary components
such as OLE objects, ask for more) than contras (are there any ? :-)). 

Oleg
