Question

Are there a real reason to use dynamic linking and binary distributions these days?

For binary distributions there’s an alternative in distributing everything in source code and letting the platform do the choice of compiling binaries or not. But whether it is usable or not depends about how well can today’s computers compile from source code.

Dynamic linking belongs to the question, since it allows distributing libraries in binaries as well.

So, how good performance a compiler can show off? With optimizations or without? What can be done to get better performance out from a compiler?

Answer 1

The gentoo Linux distribution does just that. We’re close to the point where it becomes more cheap to distribute source instead of binaries. Currently, there are a couple of issues which need to be solved:

1. You need a compiler, first. That will always have to be supplies as binary, so a 100% source system will never work. But that’s a side issue, really.
2. Compiling is slow, even today. Compilers are getting better and CPUs are getting faster and tools like make allow to compile code in parallel. But it’s still slower than copying a file from the installation media to disk. A lot slower.
3. Modern languages (a.k.a Scripting Languages) usually compile on the fly. That solves this issue at the cost of runtime speed. But they are getting better. In a couple of years, they’ll catch up. In the end, it’s just a limit of the CPU power how many optimizations you can run in a scripting language.
4. Companies don’t want to hand out source code.
5. To compile something from source, you need all the things it depends on, so you need to compile them, too, even if you don’t really need them. Imagine an image manipulation program. It can read lots of different file formats. Do you really want to compile all libraries for each exotic image format out there before you can start installing the program itself?

OSS solves issue #3. gentoo solves #4. Right now, we’re just stuck at #2, really. Todays CPUs are just too slow to run something like games or MS Office from source code.