[the-lazy-guy]

> Once you add static linking to the toolchain (in all of its forms) things get really fucking slow.

Could you expand on that, please? Every time you run dynmically linked program, it is linked at runtime. (unless it explicitly avoids linking unneccessary stuff by dlopening things lazily; which pretty much never happens). If it is fine to link on every program launch, linking at build time should not be a problem at all.

If you want to have link time optimization, that's another story. But you absolutely don't have to do that if you care about build speed.

[1718627440]

Reading your comment is sounds like the opposite would be true, because so much linking would be needed to be done at runtime. But that perception fails to realize, that when claiming an executable is linked dynamically, most symbols were also statically linked. It is only the few public exported symbols that are dynamically linked, because there are deemed to be a reasonable separate concern, that should be handled by someone elses codebase.

I think lazily linking is the default even if you don't use dlopen, i.e. every symbol gets linked upon first use. Of course that has the drawback, that the program can crash due to missing/incompatible libraries in the middle of work.

[AdelaideSimone]

A lot of vendors use non-lazy binding for security reasons, and some platforms don't support anything other than RTLD_NOW (e.g., Android).

Anyway, while what you said is theoretically half-true, a fairly large number of libraries are not designed/encapsulated well. This means almost all of their symbols are exported dynamically, so, the idea that there are only "few public exported symbols" is unfortunately false.

However, something almost no one ever mentions is that ELF was actually designed to allow dynamic libraries to be fairly performant. It isn't something I would recommend, as it breaks many assumptions on Unices, (while you don't get the benefits of LTO) you can achieve code generation almost equivalent to static linking by using something like "-fno-semantic-interposition -Wl,-Bsymbolic,-z,now". MaskRay has a good explanation on it: https://maskray.me/blog/2021-05-16-elf-interposition-and-bsy...