From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <905a9ed2fd4bfc85f6f2764c8efaa0f7@quanstro.net>
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 21:35:27 -0500
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Install from CD fails
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i think there is a #3 here.  extension.

dynamic linking allows one to extend a program without inventing a metalanguage.
i believe there is a paper on how inferno's shell uses this to nice effect.

- erik

On Tue Apr 18 16:56:40 CDT 2006, leimy2k@gmail.com wrote:
> >   And you would have to go through all of the aforementioned troubles
> >   to achieve exactly what ? What is it, that shared libraries are good
> >   at ?
>
> #1 Maintenance - If you have 50 programs that depend on one library
> and you have a fix for the library how many things do you want to
> "remember to build"?  (though people are throwing up straw man
> arguments for this too.  I suspect the worst case scenario is not
> always the common case though.)
>
> #2 Supposed physical memory savings - libSystem on Mac OS X only
> exists in memory 1 time for all the programs that use it... sorta.
> Read Only pages are shared, writable pages are COW and yes, this adds
> a good deal of complexity to the VM of the OS to have this.
>