Re: Current status vs 1.0 wishlist, 0.9

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 01:17:40PM -0700, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> Here's what he said:
> [...]

Everybody's favorite topic again! :-)
Hope to get back to everyone on license topic soon.

> I know at least one developer (working on one of the Puppy Linux
> variants) who's waiting for this, though I can't say about
> "widespread" use. Another of the Puppy developers was fairly
> impressed with the size, though he hasn't switched from uclibc yet
> (for reasons not known to me).
> (I'm getting static binaries a couple kb larger than he gets with uclibc)

I would believe that it's possible to get smaller binaries with a
uClibc that's had lots of features turned off when the library was
built, meaning that those features are completely unavailable to
applications. On the other hand, I suspect musl will easily beat
uClibc in static linking size when uClibc is full-featured (UTF-8,
pthread, full malloc, stdio, hex floats in printf, ...) because musl
takes a lot more care not to have unnecessary cross-dependency between
.o files in the static lib. Still, some things are impossible to
optimize out with the linker - for example, printf always pulls in a
minimum amount of UTF-8 conversion code for %ls and %c.

Rich