From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: dhog@plan9.bell-labs.com
Message-Id: <200006211516.LAA21321@cse.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 11:16:02 -0400
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kriol@wally.fnal.gov writes:
> first being the ability to share code between the application
>
> hate to see gnome ported and get 20meg staticaly linked
> simple CD player

So basically you want shared libraries to mitigate the effects
of code bloat?  Why not do away with the code bloat instead?
This is Plan 9's approach.

In the case that there is some large-ish body of code that
needs to be shared between applications, the Plan 9 way
is to make that body of code into a file server which the
applications can talk to (as already suggested on this list
by Tom Duff).  In the worst case, you might need a small
stub library to put a procedure-call interface on top of
the file server interface, but it certainly doesn't have to be
as big as libX11.a!

Acme is an example of this approach; acme handles all the
gory details of text windows, so that programs like the
acme mail reader don't have to.

It might be interesting to take the Inferno Tk implementation
and build it into a Plan 9 fileserver...