Eliminating static binaries (Was: Unwanted RPM dependencies)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Bill Nottingham wrote:

>>  http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html
>>
>> (for the lazy, the binary is just 45 bytes and even *does*
>> something useful ;-)
> 
> Yes, and violates the ELF standard, and is in hand-written assembly,
> and occupies the exact same amount of disk space and memory to load
> as the dynamic version that he started out with. (Seriously, if your
> code is already under a page size, what's the point?)

That "paper" was clearly trying to do clever hack rather than
anything useful in the real world.

But the point is still valid: Linux has become somewhat bloated
over time.  Few people care to admit it, but just a few years ago
we used to make fun of those other OSes for being slow and clumsy,
and now it's us requiring more disk space, memory and cycles than
most of the others.

There are many areas we could be pointing fingers at: selinux,
fs journaling, utf8, pango, cairo, locale, tls, pie, glibc malloc
fences, kernel debug switches, paravirt_ops, etc.  Please, don't
be picky: maybe one of these items is just in the list by mistake,
but you get the point.

As a matter of fact, these are also features... Most are even
*useful* features.  But the fact is that the general attitude in
today's Linux development community is that new things go in
regardless of their impact on performance.  Usually on the basis
that computers are fast anyway.

-- 
   // Bernardo Innocenti
 \X/  http://www.codewiz.org/