Re: Question about library?

["J. Johnston" <jjohnstn at cygnus dot com>]

Brian Murphy wrote:
> 
> >       The history of newlib is that it is a C library targetted for embedded platforms.
> >       Creating a dynamic library for non-native platforms makes no sense.  Thus,
> 
> In what way does it make no sense? We do exactly that, where I work, for
> glibc because our
> embedded platform is not particularly powerful and has no disk drive but
> we still
> want the memory savings of sharing the various libraries' code.
> 
> Brian

Let me clarify.  

Historically, many of the platforms that newlib has targetted
over the years had severe memory restrictions.  Often there was no OS.
Having a Dynamic Library model like glibc or Cygwin (containing all library routines) is
much too big and doesn't provide any benefit on such platforms.  It is much
more practical to statically link the executables with the library routines they actually use,
thereby reducing the footprint as much as possible.  Platforms large enough with an OS such as 
Linux or Unix, used glibc instead of newlib.  

I was trying to note that there was no historical customer need for a dynamic library
version of newlib (certainly none were willing to pay for the work) and that is the main reason 
it is not there today.  As an extension to the newly-added Linux support, it would certainly
make sense to add this.

-- Jeff J.