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by 101914 4068 days ago
"In summary, the answer is to write lean, efficient and small pieces of code..."

What if the user could avoid "non trivial" programs, i.e. the ones that purportedly make it impossible to avoid shared libraries?

To put it another way, what if a user could have a system containing only trivial programs that each do one thing and then use them in combination to do "complex" tasks?

The term "non trivial software" is one I see continuously used as an underlying assumption and hence a justification for maintaining the status quo of all manner of existing software problems.

I do not want more "non trivial" software. I want simplicity and reliability. Not to mention comprehensibility. I get those things from so-called "trivial" software.

When some the "non trivial software" I am forced to use becomes too reliant on too much resources or too many dependencies, I stop using it and find an alternative.

This strategy has worked beautifully for me over the years.

Shared libraries was a useful concept in its day.

In my humble opinion, those days have passed. GB of memory is more than enough for me personally.

I like to use crunched binaries in my systems. As such, I do not seek out "non-trivial" software and am always looking to eliminate any existing dependencies on it.

2 comments

Web browser is an extremelly non-trivial program and still I am assured we both use it.
Not all of them. Some folks still browse the web via Emacs, Lynx, and Surf - all rather simplistic browsers which work fine for a large number of sites, including this one.
Simplistic, but not non-trivial. Neither of them use curl-the-binary for http requests, I think.
Isn't Lynx 175,000 lines of code?
Shared code is the only sane way to manage secure systems. Not only do I not want to wait 6 months for an lzo or libpng RCE to be fixed separately in 28 different pieces of software (some are no longer maintained so I'll have to wait for a kind package maintainer or modify/compile/distribute myself), I also don't want the job of finding which of my software constitute the list of programs making my system vulnerable and require this attention - or don't, if they've already been fixed (how do you check?).

Performance and disk space have almost nothing to do with why we use shared libraries, IMHO.