Re: libzsh overhead, minus the benefits

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, ari wrote:

> The only potential reason that i see for having all zsh functionality in 
> libzsh.so, while keeping the zsh binary more or less a stub into the 
> library, is the reuse of shared memory mappings.

No; that has nothing to do with it.

On some operating systems to which zsh has been ported, it is not possible 
to have dynamic (relocatable, if I recall correctly) symbol linkage from a 
non-dynamic library to a dynamic one.  That is, it's first necessary to 
load at least one library via a static linkage, and then that library can 
load other libraries at run time.

So nearly all of zsh was put into a loadable library so that the zmodload 
command would work, and could be programmed in nearly the same way, on all 
the platforms where zsh compiles.