Our bloat problem [LWN.net]

Our bloat problem

Posted Aug 6, 2005 11:22 UTC (Sat) by dmantione (guest, #4640)
In reply to: Our bloat problem by roelofs
Parent article: Our bloat problem

In other words, it is bloat. All that people want fom libpng is read and
write png files and I doubt it is being used for more than that in the
majority of situations.

I know the differences between iff and png. I'd say png is even easier to
read than iff.

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libraries

Posted Aug 12, 2005 14:03 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

Actually, as far as I know a well written lib won't have much non-read-only static data (so it can be shared efficiently), and should incur only a very small memory overhead for any unused portions. If I recall correctly unused parts of the library aren't even read from disk.

There are many things to complain about with shared libraries, but their on-disk size is not one of them unless you're building embedded systems. If you are, you can build a cut down version of most libraries quite easily.