Quick point by point: - A bugfix to a library requires every program that uses it to be relinked. It's true for dynamically linked programs, too, they are rel

Quick point by point: - A bugfix to a library requires every program that uses it to be relinked. It's true for dynamically linked programs, too, they are relinked over and over. The solution to a forgetful admin is a freaking makefile. - Security by obscurity, don't care. But if you care, addresses can be randomized during static linking, which should happen on the target system anyway (see previous point). - Nobody cares anymore. Hard disks are enormous, memory is enormous, a tiny fraction of either is taken up by binaries. Unless you're on a microcontroller, where you don't have enough ram to even consider dynamic linking. - No! Bad Ulrich! Terrible, horrible, awful design! Bad Ulrich! The "features" of glibc that require dynamic linking should be taken out and shot. The stuff that is too complicated to be implemented without dynamically loading code should be moved into a separate process. Just use dbus, it's pretty much needed for everything anyway. Or embed a scripting language. No, not the one implemented by ld.so!! - Related, stop sabotaging statically linked binaries already, will you, Ulrich? - Wrong! You can distribute objects and link on the target system. Which you have to do anyway, see above. - I'm not sure how I feel about those 'hacks'. At any rate, if we want these hacks, we also get the complexity of the dynamic linker, some form of DLL hell and "Warning: gethostbyname() requires the exact version of glibc, etc..." I don't like the tradeoff, maybe because I don'd debug using LD_PRELOAD shenanigans. - Bonus, from the clarification: What, fewer DSOs make startup faster? Didn't you just say, that with prelinking, dynamic linking was as fast as static linking? Did you just make that up? I get the distinct feeling, Ulrich Drepper is on a crusade to eradicate static linking, and these "arguments" taste a lot like motivated reasoning. I don't know what's driving this guy, but things like the terrible implementation of the NSS cause actual problems in practice. Has he just found a shiny toy and refuses to let go of it? Does he get off on knowing that every program in existence runs a script on startup and he's in control of the interpreter (ld.so)? I don't know, but rationally, his arguments make no sense. MUSL is great software, btw.