Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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Ahh the eternal cycle of static vs dynamic linking swings around again.

"I need common.lib, it gets linked into my application at compile-time"

"why does every binary include this common.lib code? Let's pull that out to a shared module so we only have one version of it! See? that saved 35739475749Kb of storage! Everything is smaller and sleeker now!"

"which version of common.lib does this application need? Hmm, but that other application needs an older version. I'll have to hack some way of having multiple versions of the common.lib available"

"ahh, this application needs version 5.2.1 but that dependency needs version 4.11.6! Two incompatible versions in the same application! Who designed this thing?"

"right, let's compile whatever versions of common.lib we need into our binary. It'll make life easier and to be honest there are so many versions of common.lib around that we might as well have a separate version for every application"

"Ah, small problem, I have to compile a binary for my application for each variant of each platform because common.lib actually varies per platform... hmm, wonder if I can link to the system version of that lib at run-time..."

<repeat until heat death of the universe>

> Ahh the eternal cycle of static vs dynamic linking swings around again.

Somewhat. Although it's agnostic to static vs dynamic linking. The philosophy goes a bit deeper than that.

> See? that saved 35739475749Kb of storage!

Storage capacity hasn't been relevant for over a decade.

Besides, we foolishly replaced "use shared modules to save storage space" with "build multi-gigabyte docker images because it's the only way to reliably launch a simple program without crashing on startup".

> Storage capacity hasn't been relevant for over a decade.

Bullshit. It's especially visible with games. I cannot install more than 3-4 big games on my 512GB drive because apparently all game developers believe that "storage capacity isn't relevant".

Let me rephrase, storage capacity with respond to dynamic/shared libraries hasn't been relevant for over a decade.

AAA video games have massive storage requirements primarily due to textures, and sometimes audio. Which is a totally different conversation. It's not a bunch of redundant static libraries causing your pain.

$100 will get you an 8Tb spinning drive or a 1Tb SSD or possibly 2TB. You can also get an external SSD for the same price. Large game sizes is a real and annoying issue. But even 4 year old consoles launched with a 1Tb SSD.

That is almost all assets and has almost nothing to do with static vs shared. In fact, making things shared usually makes them worse, because you miss out on WPLTO.

Storage is cheap. Buy a bigger drive.

> Storage capacity hasn't been relevant for over a decade.

The Linux installs that run your Pi, router, toaster, security camera and toothbrush begs to differ.

> Storage capacity hasn't been relevant for over a decade.

> Besides, we foolishly replaced "use shared modules to save storage space" with "build multi-gigabyte docker images because it's the only way to reliably launch a simple program without crashing on startup".

But... you just said it still is :) By two orders of magnitude now.

Storage capacity was relevant in an earlier iteration of the cycle, I apologise for making that point so clumsily.

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