Jasen Betts wrote in a message to Neil Heller:

 JB> I don't see how knowing either way would be important to the 
 JB> programmer.

I guess it depends on how large and complex a program we're talking about
here.  In some cases,  maybe even most,  it won't matter because of the
environment we're running in compared to what we used to have to deal with.

Under a unix-type environment,  stuff gets swapped out in
"pages",  right?  You don't even know when this is likely to
happen unless you have a pretty good idea as to how you write is going to
translate to what in the executable.

I guess for some things,  like on a system with small resources or on one
that's heavily loaded it might make more sense to have stuff stay local to
each other.

 JB> AFAICT all that's cained by dynamic linking is smaller binaries 
 JB> and some small ram savings where different apps that use the same
 JB> library functions are "running" concurrently,

That's not necessarily a trivial thing,  though I don't know of any way to
really estimate its impact.  Except that I can run linux on *way* earlier
hardware and get equivalent performance to that of competing software which
almost has to run on much later stuff.

 JB> it may be possible to arrange a makefile to define a macro 
 JB> according to the availablilty of dynamic linking

Makefiles are something I haven't had to deal with yet,  or at least
composing them.  I've looked in a couple to see what some of the options
are,  and that's about it so far.

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