The second link is to gibberish from reddit. Not sure if it's a joke or if it represents the opinions of cat-v.

But the first link is on the money. I would not call it "odd" as that seems to carry a negative connotation. Rather, it's sensible, albeit irreverent, thinking to question dynamic linking (as the Plan 9 people have) and alas the mainstream of software development has a difficult time thinking sensibly and prefers to "follow the herd".

Dynamic linking is anything but a clear "win", using the silly web lingo of today. It's one of those many engineering trade offs we continue to live with even though the original rationale for its adoption no longer exists.

Here's the problem as I see it.

You link to a library of n functions where, e.g., n > 10. But your program only uses 1 or 2 of those functions.

There is no accounting method for keeping track of which functions each of those "4000" different binaries uses. How easy is it to tell me what functions each of those "4000" binaries uses, and which libraries they reside in? I have to resort to binutils hackery to extract this info, but it seems like basic information that should be easily available... because it should be used in making decisions.

Why link to a library with, e.g., > 10 functions when your program only uses, e.g., 2 of them?

How many functions in those libraries that your program links to are not used by your program?

No big deal you say. And that's true. Because of dynamic linking.

Dynamic linking to some degree makes us disregard this wasteful "black box" approach to use of library functions.

But what if we started static linking? Then maybe we start to think more about those functions that are in the linked library but are not used. We might even question the whole idea of libraries.

What if we took an accounting of all the unused functions? How much space would they account for?

Why package functions together in libraries? Whatever the original reasons were for adopting this practice, do they still exist today?

How many libraries do you have installed on your system that are only used by one or a few programs? Is there a threshhold for how many programs need to use a group of functions before it justifies creating a library tobe shared?

If we really want to have functions that are to be shared among many disparate programs, and we have "4000" programs (cf. the no. of programs on a system in the 1980's) then it makes less sense to place them in arbitrary libraries (how many people know the location of every C fucntion purely based on library names intuition?) that have to be linked to as a unit. We perpetuate a black box. It makes more sense to have each function available on its own, and each program can select only those functions that it needs.

This is if we were static linking.

I do a lot of static linking because I move programs from system to system. It works very well.

Another thing that I sometimes think about is the sticky bit. We try to achieve the same effect with caching. You call a program for the first time, it take some time to load. You call it a second time and hopefully it's all in the cache, and it is much more "responsive". But what if it cannot fit in the cache? What if another program displace it? Why can't we conscisouly keep a program in a "cache"? We give control to the OS, and we hope everything works as intended.

Dynamic linking reminds me very much of package management systems, particularly those that build form source. It's extremely difficult to tell what a particular install procedure consists of. You type "make" and what happens next is in many respects a black box. Only so much information can be reliably extracted from the system. For example, if you wanted to know all the possible Makefile variables in the package management system, it's virtually impossible to get a list. You can get most, but not all.

The way thse systems work is a lot like shared libraries. The mainatiners err on the side of overinclusion of dependencies, some of which may not actually be needed, in order to keep the black box working reliably.