Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

4
  • 1
    I'm kinda curious why this got two downvotes overnight. Commented Sep 25, 2015 at 7:46
  • 7
    I didn't but I don't think this really answers the question in sufficient depth. It pretty much just says "software gets bigger because it does more stuff", and you'll see from the other answers that there's really more to it than that. Commented Sep 25, 2015 at 11:32
  • 1
    A related factor is that in systems which use static linking, a linker may only need to pull in code which is actually used [some linkers would always pull in everything, but better ones tried to be selective]. When using dynamic linking, especially if modules can be shared, even if the first code that installs a module only needs one function from it, there's no way of knowing what functions may be needed by other code that wants to share the module. Commented Sep 25, 2015 at 17:09
  • @sharptooth I don't even wonder anymore. While in most cases the system works I also see horribly wrong broken answers get upvoted like crazy and accepted while the correct ones are downvoted into oblivion all too often... Commented Oct 2, 2015 at 14:11