Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems
Charly Castes, Adrien Ghosn · 2023
While software applications, programming languages, and hardware have changed, operating systems have not. Widely-used commodity operating systems are still modelled after the ones designed in the seventies. The accumulated burden of backward compatibility with the large software ecosystems that run our workloads prevents systems from embracing more efficient and disruptive designs explored by the system research community.