Dynamic linking wasn't an optimization (or at least, it certainly wasn't just an optimization). It allows for things like smaller executable sizes, more shared code in memory, and synchronized security updates. You can, if you want, try the approach of "if you have 384GB of RAM, you don't need to care about these things", and in that sense you're on quicksand with the "just an optimization". Yes, the benefits of sharing library code in memory are reduced by increasing system RAM, but we're seeing from a growing chorus of both developers and users, the "oh, forget all that stupid stuff, we've got bigger faster computers now" isn't going so well.

There's also the problem that dynamic loading relies on almost all the same mechanisms as dynamic linking, so you can't get rid of those mechanisms just because your main build process used static linking.

it allows for all of the things you list, yes, but those things just aren't really valuable compared to the reliable execution of a specific binary, regardless of any specific shared library that may be installed on a host

smaller executable sizes, shared code in memory, synchronized security updates, are all basically value-zero, in any modern infrastructure

there is no "growing chorus" of developers or users saying otherwise, it is in fact precisely the opposite, statically linked binaries are going extremely well, they are very clearly the future

> it allows for all of the things you list, yes, but those things just aren't really valuable compared to the reliable execution of a specific binary

> smaller executable sizes, shared code in memory, synchronized security updates, are all basically value-zero, in any modern infrastructure

This highlights the fact that you're extremely focused on one particular model of development, one where a single person or group deploys software that they are responsible for running and maintaining - often software that they've written themselves.

This is, obviously, an extremely appropriate paradigm for the enterprise. Static linking makes a lot of sense here. Python's virtual environments are basically the approved workaround for the fact that Python was built for systems that are not statically linked, and I cherish it for exactly that reason. Use Go on your servers - I do myself! But that doesn't mean it's appropriate everywhere.

Sometimes developers in this mindset forget there's a whole other world out there, a world of personal computers, that each have hundreds or thousands of applications installed. Applications on these systems are not deployed, they are installed. The mechanism by which this happens (on Linux) is via distributions and maintainers, and dynamic linking needs to be understood as designed for that ecosystem. Linux operating systems are built around making things simple, reliable, and secure for collections of software that are built and distributed by maintainers.

I'm firmly on the side of the fence that says that dynamic linking is the correct way to do that. All the benefits you mention are just a free bonus, of course, but I care about them as well. Smaller executable sizes? Huge win on my 256 GB SSD. Synchronized security updates? Of course I care about those as an end user!

I hugely agree that the parent is definitely definitely favoring one and only one kind of software model.

You raise the world of personal computers. And I think dynamic linking is absolutely a choice that has huge advantages for these folks.

There's other realms too. Embedded software needs smaller systems, so the dynamic library savings can be huge there. Hyper-scaler systems, where thousands of workloads can be running concurrently, can potentially scale to much much much higher usages with dynamic linking.

It's a little far afield, but with systems like webasssembly we're really looking less at a couple orgs within a company each shipping a monolith or two, and we're potentially looking way more at having lots of very small functions with a couple helper libraries interacting. This isn't exactly a classic dynamic library, but especially with the very safe sandboxing built in, the ideal model is far closer to something like dynamic linking where each library can be shared than it is shared.

> Sometimes developers in this mindset forget there's a whole other world out there, a world of personal computers, that each have hundreds or thousands of applications installed.

it's not that i forget about these use cases, it's that i don't really consider them relevant

tooling that supports industrial use cases like mine is not really able to support end-user use cases like yours at the same time

linux operating systems may have at one point been built around making things as you describe by distribution maintainers, but that model is anachronistic and no longer useful to the overwhelming majority of its user base, the huge majority of software is neither built nor distributed by maintainers, it is built and distributed by private enterprises

> > Sometimes developers in this mindset forget there's a whole other world out there, a world of personal computers, that each have hundreds or thousands of applications installed.

> it's not that i forget about these use cases, it's that i don't really consider them relevant

Yes, exactly! It's an extremely myopic vision. You've spent this long thread arguing against dynamic linking on the basis of what is only a small fraction of total human / computer interactions! By "not relevant" you mean not relevant to the enterprise. I grant that of course - but these uses cases are (by definition) relevant to hundreds of millions of PC users.

> the huge majority of software is neither built nor distributed by maintainers, it is built and distributed by private enterprises

The overwhelming majority of the software I run is built and distributed by maintainers. Literally, there are only a few exceptions, like static-built games that rarely or never change and are (unfortunately) closed source. I daresay that's true for the majority of Linux users - the vast majority of the software we install and use is not "built and distributed by private enterprises".

This reality is what Linux-on-the-desktop is built for. There are millions of people who are going to want to continue using computers this way, and people like me will continue contributing to and developing distributions for this use case, even if shipping static or closed-source binaries to Linux users becomes common.

linux-on-the-desktop is also like statistically zero of linux installations (modulo mobile) but if that's counter to a belief of yours then we're definitely not going to make progress here so (shrug)

like i'm not sure you understand the scale of enterprise linux. a single organization of not-that-very-many people can easily create and destroy hundreds of millions of deployed systems every day, each with a novel configuration of installed software. i've seen it countless times.

I think we're arguing on multiple fronts here and that is confusing things.

1. My point about Linux on the desktop is that there are in practice users like me who are already getting the (many) advantages of dynamic linking, and don't want to give up those advantages. To the point that some of us are going to support and work on distributions that continue the traditional Linux way in this area. In your view, the ecosystem has moved to software being built and distributed by private corporations. I don't think this has happened - on Windows software was always built and distributed this way; on (desktop) Linux it never was and largely still isn't!

2. My point about the desktop in general is that this use case matters to the vast majority of computer-using human beings much more than enterprise. The number of deployed containers that get created and destroyed every day doesn't change that fact, nor does the fact that Linux users are merely a tiny fraction of this desktop use case. This is what creates the myopia I was talking about - you're thinking about metrics like "number of systems deployed" whereas I'm thinking of number of human-computer interactions that are impacted. I don't think you can just discard what matters on the desktop or paint it as irrelevant. Desktop computing shouldn't be subordinate to the technical requirements of servers!

So to summarize the argument: (a) desktop use cases still matter because they comprise the majority of human-computer interactions, (b) dynamic linking and the maintainer model are the superior approach for desktop computing, and in fact complement each other in important ways, and (c) even if most desktop users can't take advantage of this model because of the dominance of closed source software and the corporate development model, desktop Linux can and does, and will hopefully continue to do so into the future.

> Desktop computing shouldn't be subordinate to the technical requirements of servers!

i guess this is the crux of the discussion

linux desktop computing for sure _is_ subordinate to linux server computing, by any reasonable usage metric

i'm not trying to deny your experience in any way, nor suggest that dynamic linking goes away, or anything like that -- your use case is real, linux on the desktop is real, that use case isn't going away

but it is pretty clear at this point that linux on the server is wildly successful, linux on mobile is successful (for android), and that linux on the desktop is at best a niche use case

the majority of human interactions with linux occur via applications, services, tools, etc. that are served by linux servers, and not by software running on local machines like desktops or laptops

linux is a server operating system first and foremost

whether we want unobservable ungovernable far off machines running the future forever, or whether we want a future where actual people can compute & see what happens seems to matter. the numbers may perhaps stack up to suborn PC needs to industrial computing needs now, but is that the future anyone should actually want? should the invisible hand of capital be the primary thing humanity should try to align to?

and where is the growth potential? is the industrial need going to become greatly newly empowered & helpful to this planet, to us? will it deliver & share the value potential out there? PC may be a smaller factor today, but i for one am incredibly fantastically excited to imagine a potential future 10 years from now where people start to PC again, albeit in a different way.

individual PCs have no chance. it's why the cloud has won. on-demand access wherever you are, consistent experience across devices is incredibly incredibly convenient. but networks of PCs that work well together is exciting, and we've only so very recently started emerging the capability to have nice easy to manage ops/automated multi-machine personal-computing. we've only recently emerged to maturity where a better, competitive personal computing is really conceivable.

it's been the alpha linux geeks learning how to compute and industrial players learning how to compute, and the invisible hand has been fat happy & plump from it, but imo there's such a huge potential here to re-open computing to persons, to create compelling interesting differently-capable sovereign/owned computing systems, that are free from so many of the small tatters & deprevations & enshittifications that cloud- that doing everyting on other people's computers as L-Users- unnerringly drops on us. we should & could be a more powerful, more technically-cultural culture, and i think we've severely underrated how much subtle progress there's been to make that a much less awful, specialized, painful, time-consuming, low-availability, disconnected effort than it used to be.

>Applications on these systems are not deployed

In a way they are. You deploy it to the store and then as people's computers download the update automatically.

A counter example to your claims about Linux is Android. Libraries are not shared between apps (beyond the android framework and libc). This is despite the fact that phones have limited storage.

the chorus is about the assumptions commonly found among younger devs that these old "efficiency" and "optimization" techniques don't matter any more. c.f. apps (desktop, mobile) that take forever to do things that should not take forever.

"modern infrastructure" seems like a bit of a giveaway of your mind set. yes, i know that there's a lot of stuff that now happens by having your web browser reach out to "infrastructure" and then the result is displayed in front of you.

But lots of people still use their computers to run applications outside the browser, where "modern infrastructure" means either nothing at all, or it means "their computer (or mobile platform)". the techniques mentioned in this subthread are all still very relevant in this context.

there is basically no situation in which it is important to optimize for binary size, embedded sure, but nowhere else

the infrastructural model i'm describing doesn't require applications to run in browsers, or imply that applications are slower, actually quite to the contrary, statically linked binaries tend to be faster

the model where an OS is one to many with applications works fine for personal machines, it's no longer relevant for most servers (shrug)

> there is basically no situation in which it is important to optimize for binary size, embedded sure, but nowhere else

Not disagreeing that there many upsides to statically linking, but there are (other) situations where binary size matters. Rolling updates (or scaling horizontally) where the time is dominated by the time it takes to copy the new binaries, e.g.

> the model where an OS is one to many with applications works fine for personal machines, it's no longer relevant for most servers

Stacking services with different usage characteristics to increase utilization of underlying hardware is still relevant. I wouldn't be surprised if enabling very commonly included libraries to be loaded dynamically could save significant memory across a fleet .. and while the standard way this is done is fragile, it's not hard to imagine something that could be as reliable as static linking, esp in cases where you're using something like buck to build the world on every release anyway

it was never relevant for servers. and there are probably still fewer servers than end-user systems out there, certainly true if you include mobile (there are arguments for and against that).

servers vastly, almost totally, outnumber end-user systems, in terms of deployed software

end-user systems account for at best single-digit percentages of all systems relevant to this discussion

(mobile is not relevant to this discussion)

binary size is also memory size. memory size matters. applications sharing the same libraries can be a huge win for how much stuff you can fit on a server, and that can be a colossal time/money/energy saver.

yes: if you're a company that tends to only run 1-20 applications, no, the memory-savings probably won't matter to you. that matches quite a large number of use cases. but a lot of companies run way more workloads than anyone would guess. quite a few just have no cost-control and/or just don't know, but there's probably some pretty sizable potential wins. it's even more important for hyper-scalers, where they're running many many customer processes at a time. even companies like facebook though, i forget the statistic, but sometime in the last quarter there was quote saying like >30% of their energy usage was just powering ram. willing to bet, they definitely optimize for binary size. they definitely look at it.

there's significant work being put towards drastically reducing scale of disk/memory usage across multiple containers, for example. composefs is one brilliant very exciting example that could help us radically scale up how much compute we can host. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34524651

i also haven't seen the very important very critical other type of memory mentioned, cache. maybe we can just keep paying to add DRAM forever and ever (especially with CXL coming across the horizon), but the SRAM in your core-complex will almost always tend to be limited (although word is Zen4 might get within striking distance of 1GB which is EPIC). static builds are never going to share cache effectively. the instruction cache will always be unique per process. the most valuable expensive fancy memory on the computer is totally trashed & wasted by static binaries.

there's really nothing to recommend about static binaries, other than them being extremely stupid. them requiring not a single iota of thought to use is the primary win. (things like monomorphic optimization can be done in dynamic libraries with various metaprogramming & optimizing runtimes, hopefully one's that don't need to keep respawning duplicate copies ad-nauseum.)

i do think you're correct about the dominant market segment of computing, & you're speaking truthfully to a huge % of small & mid-sized businesses, where the computing needs are just incredibly simple & the ratio of processes to computers is quote low. their potential savings are not that high, since there's just not that much duplicate code to keep dynamically linking. but i also think that almost all interesting upcoming models of computing emphasize creating a lot more smaller lighter processes, that there are huge security & managability benefits, and that there's not a snowman's chance in hell that static-binary style computing has any role to play in the better possible futures we're opening up.

you're very sensitive to the costs of static linking but i don't think you see the benefit

the benefit is that a statically linked binary will behave the same on all systems and doesn't need any specific runtime support above or beyond the bare minimum

this is important if you want a coherent deployment model at scale -- it cannot be the case that the same artifact X works fine on one subset of hosts, but not on another subset of hosts, because their openssl libraries are different or whatever

static linking is not stupid, it doesn't mean that hosts can only have like 10 processes on them, it doesn't imply that the computing needs it serves are simple, quite the opposite

future models of computing are shrinking stuff like the OS to zero, the thing that matters is the application, security (in the DLL sense you mean here) is not a property of a host, it's a property of an application, it seems pretty clear to me that static linking is where we're headed, see e.g. containers