--- David Cournapeau <cournapeau@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp> wrote:
On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 08:20 -0800, Lou Pecora wrote:
Yes, a good question. Two reasons I started off with the static library. One is that Gnu instructions claimed the dynamic library did not always build properly on the Mac OS X.
If true, that's a good argument. I don't know the state of libtool of mac os X (the part of autotools which deals with building libraries in a cross platform way). Given the history of apple with open source, I would not be surprised if the general support was subpar compared to other unices.
I ran the GSL install again and allowed the dynamic lib to be built. It worked fine so maybe Apple has done better lately. I should have tried it right from the beginning. Anyway, I have a make script that seems to work find and I can link my shared lib to the GSL library or, I would guess, any other library I have. Thanks, again for your helpful suggestions. I will put up my code (it's small) for others to see on this list in a separate message. That might help others not to make the same mistakes I did.
I don't know what kind of applications you are developing, but taking care of the time to load the application because of the huge number of symbols seems like really premature optimization to me. That's the kind of problems you don't see if your applications are not huge (or developed with C++, which put a huge pressure on the linker/loader tools by its very nature).
Also, note that all modern OS (this includes even windows since NT) do not load the whole shared library in memory, and that two applications needing the GSL will share the same version in memory. The same "physical page" of a shared library can be "mapped" into different address spaces (for different processes). I use "", because that's a huge over-simplification, and that's where it reaches my own understanding of the thing. This sharing cannot happen for static libraries.
Good advice. You are right. My code is not large and it loads fast. -- Lou Pecora, my views are my own. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping