interesting gnome-hackers thread on shared libraries

[Bill Gribble]

If any of you are on gnome-hackers, pay attention to the thread "On the
cost of shared libraries".  When this thread gets a little closer to
conclusion, I'll try to snarf the whole thing into one message and
repost it here.  Basically, motivated by gnucash's excessive number of
shared libs :), somebody set out to run some tests to measure the
performance penalty of shared libs on an application. 

Turns out, in the common case it's not an issue; even linking as many
libs as gnucash does should have no significant performance hit; but
optimizing the way libs are written (minimizing exported global
variables, for instance) can meaningfully affect startup time. 

For us, most of the startup time is loading Scheme code, but it's an
interesting thread and may have some useful bits for gnucash. 

b.g.