SunOS before 4.0, when it still used SunView¹ instead of X11, still did not have dynamic linking. Hence this email rant by John Rose titled
Pros and Cons of Suns from 1987 (as included in the preface of
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook²):
[…]
What has happened? Two things, apparently. One is that when I created my custom patch to the window system, to send mouse clicks to
Emacs, I created another massive 3/4 megabyte binary, which
doesn’t share space with the standard Sun window applications
(“tools”).
This means that instead of one huge mass of shared object code running the window system, and taking up space on my paging disk, I
had two such huge masses, identical except for a few pages of code.
So I paid a megabyte of swap space for the privilege of using a
mouse with my editor. (Emacs itself is a third large mass.)
The Sun kernel was just plain running out of room. Every trivial hack
you make to the window system replicates the entire window system.
[…]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView
2. https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
[…]
What has happened? Two things, apparently. One is that when I created my custom patch to the window system, to send mouse clicks to Emacs, I created another massive 3/4 megabyte binary, which doesn’t share space with the standard Sun window applications (“tools”).
This means that instead of one huge mass of shared object code running the window system, and taking up space on my paging disk, I had two such huge masses, identical except for a few pages of code. So I paid a megabyte of swap space for the privilege of using a mouse with my editor. (Emacs itself is a third large mass.) The Sun kernel was just plain running out of room. Every trivial hack you make to the window system replicates the entire window system.
[…]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView
2. https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf