i think there is a #3 here. extension. dynamic linking allows one to extend a program without inventing a metalanguage. i believe there is a paper on how inferno's shell uses this to nice effect.
- erik On Tue Apr 18 16:56:40 CDT 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > And you would have to go through all of the aforementioned troubles > > to achieve exactly what ? What is it, that shared libraries are good > > at ? > > #1 Maintenance - If you have 50 programs that depend on one library > and you have a fix for the library how many things do you want to > "remember to build"? (though people are throwing up straw man > arguments for this too. I suspect the worst case scenario is not > always the common case though.) > > #2 Supposed physical memory savings - libSystem on Mac OS X only > exists in memory 1 time for all the programs that use it... sorta. > Read Only pages are shared, writable pages are COW and yes, this adds > a good deal of complexity to the VM of the OS to have this. >
