App sizes are out of control

Re:App sizes are out of control by maxxxxx on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @02:00PM (#14903488)

It's pretty ironic that dynamic linking's main motivation was to eliminate duplicate code and reduce code size. Deploy a DLL once, every software uses it and doesn't have to include it.

Now it has turned out exactly the opposite way. If we went back to linking object code together we would get smaller sizes. Instead we have to include huge DLLs.

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Re:App sizes are out of control by verytrivial on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @07:11AM (#14909594)

> dynamic linking's main motivation was to eliminate duplicate code and reduce code size

I'm pretty sure the main motivation is/was to allow patching of dependencies independently from applications. Very popular shared libraries might save space overall, but that is a secondary effect.

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Re:App sizes are out of control by maxxxxx on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @01:26PM (#14912661)

When I started out the main motivation was to get install sizes down. At least on Windows patching never really worked and ended in "DLL hell".

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Re:App sizes are out of control by dfox on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @03:56PM (#14904693)

IIRC Windows has pretty involved infrastructure for deduplicating same executable images both in memory and on disk.

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