Re: static linking and dlopen

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Sun, Dec 09, 2012 at 05:24:29PM +0200, Paul Schutte wrote:
> This makes sense.
>  Wonder if there is a spesific reason why the browser folks does'nt produce
> a statically linked browser anymore.
> The browsers would be good candidates for what you mentioned about C++ and
> dynamic bloat.

It's because dynamic linking is part of their _development_ model. My
understanding is that they lack proper functional makefiles that would
facilitate clean incremental compiling and linking, so they instead
break the project up into a number of separate library components, and
they can then rebuild just a single component to test (since it gets
dynamically loaded anyway) rather than having to rebuild the whole
program from scratch.

While I think this is a stupid development model, as long as they're
just doing it for development, it doesn't really harm end users that
much. The problem is that they don't have a "release" build mode that
just links everything together the right way. It's not clear to me
whether this would be easy to change; it's possible that, due to
always using dynamic linking internally, a number of dependencies on
dynamic-linking-related behavior (symbol interposition, accessing
things via dlsym, etc.) crept into the code, and would be painful to
exorcise (especially under the constraint of not breaking their
dynamic builds).

Rich