[I should not have brought shared libs into this, I now regret it, because it sidetracked the entire discussion, but...] The extra processing is more significa

[I should not have brought shared libs into this, I now regret it, because it sidetracked the entire discussion, but...] The extra processing is more significant than most people think. The library has to be compiled as relocatable code, which incurs a runtime performance penalty. You also lose a register, which especially on register-constrained architectures is really bad (it was a tragedy on iA32, it's less of an issue now).