IUBio

dynamically linked libraries on Mac OS X?

Ed Griffiths edgrif at sanger.ac.uk
Thu Feb 5 04:34:13 EST 2004


Douglas,

> I wish to install acedb on a Mac OS X system (10.2.8). I would prefer to 
> install the "non-statically linked" version. (That is, I think I would 
> prefer it, although I'm not totally sure why. Is there an important 
> reason to do so?). To do so, I see that I need the GNU readline, GTK, 
> GDK, and  Glib libraries. Is there a way to see if I have these or if 
> they are even available for this operating system?

There are a number of reasons for using dynamically linked libraries but the 
most relevant to you is:

any libraries that acedb uses (e.g. the standard C library, glib, gtk, all the X 
Windows stuff etc. etc.) that are dynamically linked will be _shared_ between 
all copies of running acedb programs. If the libraries are statically linked 
then each running acedb program has its _own_ copy of the library code, this 
results in much greater memory use as I'm sure you can appreciate.

One way to test if you have the various libraries installed is just to try and 
run one of the dynamically linked acedb programs, if the libraries aren't there 
then the code won't run.

But actually a better way is to take a look in the appropriate directories on 
your machine, on unix systems these libraries would normally be installed in 
/usr/lib or /usr/local/lib, I would imagine that the Mac in its OS X form does 
something similar.

Hope that helps,

Ed
-- 
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Ed Griffiths, Acedb development, Informatics Group,                    |
|        Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus,  |
|               Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK                          |
|                                                                        |
| email: edgrif at sanger.ac.uk  Tel: +44-1223-494780  Fax: +44-1223-494919 |
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