Developing and Porting C and C++ Applications on AIX

A brief history of UNIX programming development

The traditional UNIX compilation technique historically involved static linking. With this technique, multiple object files defining global symbols and containing code and data were combined and written to an executable file with all the references resolved. The executable was a single self contained file, and often became quite large. However, since the name and location of all symbols were resolved at link-time, a program could be executed by simply reading it into memory and transferring control to its entry point. Static linking, which is still used in certain circumstances, has the following drawbacks:

• If any of the libraries used by the program are updated, the program needs to be re-linked ...