Eliminating static binaries (Was: Unwanted RPM dependencies)

[Denis Leroy]

Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 10:04:59AM +0200, Denis Leroy wrote:
>>> Are you sure? For little apps, linking dynamically leads to a loss in
>>> performance in both size and speed.
>> That's a very questionable statement, and may only be true under very 
>> unusual conditions (such as: the linked dyn libraries are never shared 
>> with other executables).  I don't see how the run-time execution could 
>> technically be slower, outside of the start-up time.
> 
> Even if dyn libraries are shared, the code that is needed to perform the
> link may add more to the executable. You can try with a simple 'hello
> world' that use printf.

But that penalty is dwarfed by the extra cache misses caused by the 
larger cache footprints of a statically linked executable. I'm sure it's 
possible to come up with a counter example, but it's likely to be an 
unusual corner case (as least as far as glibc is concerned), or 
something that's simply not a real world example.