This is only tangentially related to the topics covered in the article and your comment, but I'm curious about the Chromium project's decision to mostly use static linking.

I've always found it interesting that Chrome is shipped mostly as one big binary (or on Windows, two: chrome.dll and chrome_child.dll), whereas IE and Safari use several (one for the rendering engine, one for the JS engine, one or two for networking, etc.). My guess is that Chrome uses one big binary to minimize startup time, since the OS can just map that binary into memory and go. Am I correct about the rationale? Another way to ask the same thing is this: what would be the downsides of using a component build for releases and not just for development? If you used a component build for releases, you'd have greater parity between dev and production, and that's generally a good thing.

I also notice that there are a few modules that get their own DLLs, at least on Windows. For example, in Chrome 45, we have chrome_elf.dll, libegl.dll, libexif.dll, and libglesv2.dll; I'd think these libraries could be statically linked just like the few hundred others. Are there good reasons for these exceptions? Or are these just little details that tend to get overlooked given the rapid pace of development?