On Friday, 3 February 2012 at 04:23:34 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
I have seen a flag in Linux for hosting virtual machines, but it must be an enormous overhead to check every executable page or every executable file on the file system for duplicates.
tbh I haven't benchmarked it, but one of the cloud providers I worked on used it on Solaris, and we had a good experience.
great, but the most spread OSes today and in the foreseeable future wont have filesystems that do something like automatic hardlinks of duplicate pages in executables.
Regardless, most computers today aren't exactly counting their kilobytes either. (And those that are don't multitask much anyway.) Phobos, in a typical D program, consumes a few hundred kb. Maybe if you're running 1,000 D processes at once will it become a problem... but that's not a realistic scenario. Distributing standalone D programs, or having D programs that use different versions of Phobos *is* something we face. With static linking, this isn't a problem. It's mindlessly easy.
Let's imagine the library to link against against was Gtk. Would you want every binary download on the internet to include libraries of that size?
Yes, actually. I'd rather download a 10 MB executable that *actually works* than have to download a separate library, and hope I get the right version. (And 10 MB is probably an overestimate! I've used statically linked Qt apps that come in at only about 6 MB.) There's times when dynamic linking is a good call. Core operating system libraries, plugins, stuff like that. But, Phobos isn't one of them, and I doubt it ever will be.
