Linking

See Dynamic linking for an older discussion specifically of dynamic linking. This page replaces it.

Use cases

Static linking on the server

This lets people precompile libraries, so each build of their code does not rebuild everything. Also people can share built libraries easily.

Static linking on the client

This allows caching of libraries on the client, and linking them with code that is sent from the server that updates less frequently (and the result is then cached too).

Dynamic code loading on the client

dlopen, dlsym, etc. This is needed for things like Python loading modules are runtime, etc.