Re:Why is a Rust executable large?
by jeffdavis on Friday June 03, 2016 @11:24AM
(#11830839)
Dynamic linking offers modularity and separation of concerns.
I don't really care which point-release of zlib my program is linked with, I just want to decompress stuff. If someone finds a bug (or exploit), I am not the best person to quickly realize it and release an update -- the maintainer of zlib, and the packagers, and OS distributions, and sysadmins are in a much better position. But if it's statically linked, then developers have to be involved.
You could say that we could invent a mechanism to allow sysadmins to rebuild with patched libraries, but then we'd still need to reinvent all of the versioning and other headaches of dynamic libraries.
I think dynamic libraries are kind of like microservices. Sure, they can break stuff, but they allow higher degrees of complexity to still be manageable.
I don't really care which point-release of zlib my program is linked with, I just want to decompress stuff. If someone finds a bug (or exploit), I am not the best person to quickly realize it and release an update -- the maintainer of zlib, and the packagers, and OS distributions, and sysadmins are in a much better position. But if it's statically linked, then developers have to be involved.
You could say that we could invent a mechanism to allow sysadmins to rebuild with patched libraries, but then we'd still need to reinvent all of the versioning and other headaches of dynamic libraries.
I think dynamic libraries are kind of like microservices. Sure, they can break stuff, but they allow higher degrees of complexity to still be manageable.