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From: spanki@lands.ced.berkeley.edu (Frank Goodman)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Can some explain shared libs?
Message-ID: <1990Jan6.050638.1097@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 90 05:06:38 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: spanki@lands.ced.berkeley.edu (Frank Goodman)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 31

I just built X11R4 on my sun 3/*'s all running SunOS 4.0.3.
It required the normal amount of coersion that one would expect. Now that 
it's built, could someone explain to me why I want to take advantage of 
Sun's shared libraries? There is nothing I've found in the X documentation 
that really explains the difference. 

Is there any difference in run-time memeory use (RAM) by programs that use
shared libraries? 

The binarys are much smaller, but my performance priorities on my sun 3/50's
are RAM first, speed second(startup speed too), and diskspace third. What 
have shared libs bought me?

Can I, as an application programmer, use these libraries, and is there any
difference in the linking syntax, or for that matter the code I must write? 
In other words do I just go about writing my code and use a -lX11 flag and
I'll automatically get the shared libs or is there more to it? 

Basically, I have no clue. Could some please spell out what the heck
they do, along with all the pros/cons you can think of? 

I'm sure there must be others equally confused.

thanks
Frank.
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Frank  Goodman				arpa:  spanki@CED.Berkeley.EDU
University of California, Berkeley	  or:  spanki%CED@jade.Berkeley.EDU
College of Environmental Design		uucp:  ...hplabs!ucbvax!ced!spanki 
S.I.S. Research Laboratory	 	phone: (415) 849-1166	
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