(31-01-2020, 09:41 AM)z3bra Wrote: Unfortunately, static linking is definitely not manageable nowadays. I gave it a try a few years back, and had a really bad time getting the compiler to behave as I would (gcc is a bitch here, really).

I'm curious to know what kind of problems you encountered. Like jkl, I prefer static linking except in (some, but not all) cases where a library is truly shared -- not just by a few programs that are out there in the wild, but actually running simultaneously on a typical machine (especially my own).

I.e., I think a lot of so-called "shared libraries" aren't shared at all. The worst examples of that are what I call vanity libraries, where somebody ships an .so that is never used by any programs but his own.

IIRC, the X libraries were the original motivation for shared libraries on Unix. Back in the days when disk space was still a constraint it made sense to share a single copy of those monsters.