Comment by nrclark

Shared libraries are a pain for sure. They also have a lot of really nice advantages, including:

  - You can upgrade core functionality in one location
  - You can fix security bugs without needing to re-install the world
  - Overall, they take up less disk-space and RAM
  - They can take much less cache, which is significant today

The cache aspect is one that I'm surprised not to see people talk about more. Why would I want to blow out my CPU cache loading 20 instances of libSSL? That slows down performance of the entire system.