On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 1:23 AM, Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> wrote:

I think it depends a lot on what you're using dlopen for. A lot of
programs these days use it as a ridiculous part of the development
model rather than for any real purpose; in my book, this is among the
highest levels of Considered Harmful. There's really no reason for any
code that's internal to an application (developed in the same tree, by
the same authors, and built at the same time) to be dynamically linked
at all, much less dynamically loaded. All this accomplishes is making
the program a lot slower and more bloated.

I can not agree with you more on this.

On the flip side, the main legitimate uses for dynamic linking and
loading are (1) sharing code that's used by a wide range of
applications and allowing it to be upgraded system-wide all at once,
and (2) facilitating the extension of an application with third-party
code. Usage 1 applies mostly to dynamic linking; 2 mostly to dynamic
loading (dlopen).

I was wondering about distributing all libraries as static libraries and then have the package manager link the application statically as the final step of the installation. This way the package manager can keep track of dependencies and re-link them if a library change.

Another idea would be to just install a stub where the binary would be. First time you run this stub, it will link the binary and store it on the disk in some sort of cache. Then just do an exec of that binary. Second time that you run this stub, it will check in this cache, link it again if it is not there or just exec it if found. This way only the stuff that gets used will be re-linked. You can force a re-link by clearing the cache. This what made me wonder about programs that use dlopen.

I also wonder if the gain would be worth the trouble. I have seen a reduction of up to 50% RSS usage on programs that has a lot of shared libraries. It should improve responsiveness as there will be less paging.