• Roman Ivanov <isroman-rem move-km.ru> Jan 13 2010
• Walter Bright <newshound1 digitalmars.com> Jan 13 2010

Roman Ivanov <isroman-rem move-km.ru> writes:

Walter Bright Wrote:
 I agree that a lot of the concerns are based on obsolete notions. First 
 off, I just bought another terabyte drive for $90. The first hard drive 
 I bought was $600 for 10Mb. A couple years earlier I used a 10Mb drive 
 that cost $5000. If I look at what eats space on my lovely terabyte 
 drive, it ain't executables. It's music and pictures. I'd be very 
 surprised if I had a whole CD's worth of exe files.
 
 Next, even a very large executable doesn't necessarily run any slower 
 than a small one. The reason is the magic of demand paged virtual 
 memory. Executables are NOT loaded into memory before running. They are 
 memory-mapped in. Only code that is actually executed is EVER loaded 
 into memory.


I would say you're severely understating the issue. There are plenty of valid
reasons why small executables are desirable. Imagine every Unix utility being
several megabytes large. There are hundreds of them just in /usr/bin directory.
The concerns about updating security problems and bandwidth usage are pretty
rational as well.

Besides, there is also an issue of marketing. People have a perception that
larger programs run slower. Usually this perception is right. I would have hard
time "selling" D programs as efficient to my boss, if the executables are much
larger than their counterparts in other popular languages.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what would be involved in separating the
stuff that bloats executables into a shared library?

Walter Bright <newshound1 digitalmars.com> writes:

Roman Ivanov wrote:
 Perhaps I'm missing something, but what would be involved in
 separating the stuff that bloats executables into a shared library?



Creating a shared library version of Phobos requires someone to sit down 
and take the time to do it.