When to use dynamic linking and static linking

The operating system provides facilities for creating and using dynamically linked shared libraries. With dynamic linking, external symbols referenced in user code and defined in a shared library are resolved by the loader at load time. When you compile a program that uses shared libraries, they are dynamically linked to your program by default.

The idea behind shared libraries is to have only one copy of commonly used routines and to maintain this common copy in a unique shared-library segment. These common routines can significantly reduce the size of executable programs, thereby saving disk space.

You can reduce the size of your programs by using dynamic linking, but there is usually a trade-off in performance. The shared library code is not present in the executable image on disk, but is kept in a separate library file. Shared code is loaded into memory once in the shared library segment and shared by all processes that reference it. Dynamically linked libraries therefore reduce the amount of virtual storage used by your program, provided that several concurrently running applications (or copies of the same application) use the procedures provided in the shared library. They also reduce the amount of disk space required for your program provided that several different applications stored on a given system share a library. Other advantages of shared libraries are as follows:

• Load time might be reduced because the shared library code might already be in memory.
• Run-time performance can be enhanced because the operating system is less likely to page out shared library code that is being used by several applications, or copies of an application, rather than code that is only being used by a single application. As a result, fewer page faults occur.
• The routines are not statically bound to the application but are dynamically bound when the application is loaded. This permits applications to automatically inherit changes to the shared libraries, without recompiling or rebinding.

Disadvantages of dynamic linking include the following:

• From a performance viewpoint, there is "glue code" that is required in the executable program to access the shared segment. There is a performance cost in references to shared library routines of about eight machine cycles per reference. Programs that use shared libraries are usually slower than those that use statically-linked libraries.
• A more subtle effect is a reduction in "locality of reference." You may be interested in only a few of the routines in a library, and these routines may be scattered widely in the virtual address space of the library. Thus, the total number of pages you need to touch to access all of your routines is significantly higher than if these routines were all bound directly into your executable program. One impact of this situation is that, if you are the only user of these routines, you experience more page faults to get them all into real memory. In addition, because more pages are touched, there is a greater likelihood of causing an instruction translation lookaside buffer (TLB) miss.
• When a program references a limited number of procedures in a library, each page of the library that contains a referenced procedure must be individually paged into real memory. If the procedures are small enough that using static linking might have linked several procedures that are in different library pages into a single page, then dynamic linking may increase paging thus decreasing performance.
• Dynamically linked programs are dependent on having a compatible library. If a library is changed (for example, a new compiler release may change a library), applications might have to be reworked to be made compatible with the new version of the library. If a library is removed from the system, programs using that library will no longer work.

In statically-linked programs, all code is contained in a single executable module. Library references are more efficient because the library procedures are statically linked into the program. Static linking increases the file size of your program, and it may increase the code size in memory if other applications, or other copies of your application, are running on the system.

cc xxx.c -o xxx.noshr -O -bnso -bI:/lib/syscalls.exp

This option forces the linker to place the library procedures your program references into the program's object file. The /lib/syscalIs.exp file contains the names of system routines that must be imported to your program from the system. This file must be specified for static linking. The routines that it names are imported automatically by libc.a for dynamic linking, so you do not need to specify this file during dynamic linking. For further details on these options, see Efficient use of the ld command and the Id command.