Re: MacOS X is not Linux!

[Bill Northcott]

> From my experience, Linux seems to dynamically link everything under
> the sun as well. Personally, I'm not all that convinced by dynamic
> linking - unless its an incredibally base level library like libc,
> most libraries will only have one running application using them, and
> that will only be using one or two subroutines, so you end up with
> more code being shoved into virtual memory than if you had statically
> linked libraries.

As I understand it, you can get dyld to be more intelligent than that. 
Also memory is wery cheap now.

> I'm not entirely convinced of the latter benefits of dynamic libraries
> - usually a library upgrade breaks the program, even if the API hasn't
> changed in a relevant way, but because the dynamic loader only knows
> that the version number has changed, and so the API might be
> inconsistent. 

That is probably true for procedural langauges like fortran or C, but it 
definitely is not for object oriented languages like C++ and Objective-C. 
That is why ten year old graphical applications written for a completely 
different OS can still run on my bang up to date Mac, and what is more 
inherit many of the new features.  They have not even been reinstalled, 
never mind recompiled.

>Thus one needs to recompile the application as well. The
> same problem occurs in Windoze with the dreaded "DLL error", sometimes
> meaning one cannot run certain combinations of applications on the
> same system as they're closed source, and not available for 
recompilation.

Nuff said about inadequacy of Windows shared library management.

> Of course its entirely possible that OSX has a superior dynamic loader
> system that eliminates this problem, however forgive me if I remain
> sceptical.

That is the hype and at least some of it seems to work in practice.  It is 
the justification for incurring the speed penalty of Objective-C.

Bill Northcott

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