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Why does this even matter? The system will only ever load code into RAM that's actually used by the final binary, because code is fetched as-needed from disk/ma

• lmm 2y ago
  That other code is still taking up address space and making the symbol table bigger (and therefore slower to use). And someone might want to use your program in a context where they don't have so much disk available. More importantly these giant libraries become hard to upgrade and therefore hard to make changes to.
  • zozbot234 2y ago
    Address space is abundant enough on 64-bit platforms that we even waste a lot of it on security mitigations. Symbols tables are overhead, but loading multiple libs also involves all sorts of overhead. The disk space argument makes the most sense, but binary code doesn't take up a lot of disk space these days; a vast majority is typically used for data, media, the latest large AI model etc. Having larger shared libraries also means you no longer have to statically link that included code into multiple separate executables.