DDBeatty writes:
I know it was your opinion. I am just interested in it because DLL's are something I just do. I was wondering what reasons you may have for preferring not to use them.
To that end, I may be displaying some inexcusable ignorance but what is WPO?
I don't want to get into a long discussion about this. Just curiosity in passing.
WPO is Whole Program Optimization, enabled in MSVC with the /GL compiler option (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0zza0de8.aspx) and the /LTCG linker option (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xbf3tbeh.aspx). For code that benefits especially well from inlining, it can be a great boon to performance. That alone is enough for me to use static libs on Windows when I can; PGO (Profile Guided Optimization) only furthers my opinion. :-) Another factor for me is the size of .dlls. My boost_regex-vc90-mt-1_36.dll is 696KB; if I'm only using half the functionality in boost.regex, I don't want to distribute the functionality I'm not using with my application.