3 ms·
Has anybody actually measured it in the last decades?
by qznc 10y ago
Has anybody actually measured it in the last decades?
- hollerith 10y agoI don't know. But we know that Intel and AMD design their CPUs to go as fast as possible on the operating systems people actually use (Windows, Macos, Linux) all of which use dynamic linking. Plan 9 is the only OS I know of that does not support dynamic linking (and Plan 9 simply does not have large libraries -- they have what they call services instead, which are similar to souped-up Unix daemons). Linux and Windows in turn are designed to run as fast as possible on Intel and AMD hardware. After a few iterations of this sort of mutual evolution, it starts to become very unlikely that a change as big as switching a bunch of big libraries from being dynamically linked to being statically linked would actually improve performance because lots of optimizations have been made to squeeze a few percentage points of performance out of the existing system (which includes the practice of shipping most large libraries as shared libraries), and typically those optimizations stop working if there are large changes in the system.