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Re:An alternative to shared libraries (2008) by theamk on Monday June 25, 2018 @08:33PM (#17397045)
So an alternative to shared libraries is RPC over FUSE-like transport?

It is a sane idea and may work well, but I think the page overcomplicates it. Why bother with filesystem -- having cryptofs implement "getattr" and "readlink" seems like a total waste. Why not use the things designed for RPC?

For example, one may use raw unix sockets (this is how Xorg, and pulseaudio work), or D-Bus (this is how disk mounting in modern desktop linux works), or HTTP-based transports (this will be known as "microservices" then).

Re:An alternative to shared libraries (2008) by wiml on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @01:05AM (#17397988)
Or just… executables? My shell is "dynamically linked" to every executable on the system. Git is "dynamically linked" to my $PAGER. My IDE is "dynamically linked" to my compiler toolchain (which is itself composed of several pluggable components which are "dynamically linked" to each other).

The low overhead, easily composable, encapsulated and abstracted nature of processes is one of the things that made Unix an unusually functional operating system in the first place. Shared libraries are great, but I think a lot of the time people end up producing and linking a .so when defining an old-fashioned shell-compatible interface would be perfectly good and far less trouble.