Static or dynamic?

[sawyl]

Had an interesting discussion with one of the beakers today about static versus dynamic linking. He suggested configuring the compilers to statically link the Intel libraries, rather picking them up via LD_LIBRARY_PATH as is the case at the moment. In line with my generally contrary nature and my belief in the principle of least surprise, I advocated linking everything in statically, on the grounds that once you've got a static binary, it's pretty much guaranteed to work regardless of what happens to the libraries.

Trouble is, least surprise cuts both ways: changing to static linking will suddenly increase the size of the executables, which will throw some people, but it would bring the behaviour of the native compilers into line with that of the cross compilers.

Hmm.

Comments

[doctor-squale.livejournal.com]

Dynamic linking is madness.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much my view: not for nothing to Windows programmers talk about being stuck in DLL hell...