Libraries - Who needs them

My system has been getting sluggish lately and the file browser was taking forever.  To better understand the problem I began to check the size of various directories... and that is when a strange result appeared:   The following script will count files, guess
what it said?

    ls -R i/usr/lib/* | wc -l

One would expect to see a file count.  What I saw was 61,112 .  Assuming it was a mistake I tried a few other tests.  Same result, my system had 61,112 files in /usr/lib.  After more  digging it was clear that many of these files were seldom used and some had never been  used.   Well.., disk space is cheap, but ii does make one wonder why so many library files are used.

The /usr/lib directory is suppose to  contain either dynamic or static library files.  The static files are used to build programs at compile time and the dynamic libraries link with programs at run time.  I found a lot of each, but mostly they appeared to be dynamic library  files.

The theory is that disk space is saved by having programs share dynamic library files.  The library files can be shared by many programs and even remain in memory to save load time. Sounds good, but the theory was did not match what I was seeing.  This leads to another question.  What are the disadvantages of dynamic libraries:  How about:

 1. Dynamic libraries need to retain symbols and this takes up more disk space.
 2. Dynamic library linking slows down execution of programs.
 3. Each language trys to write its libraries in their own language and there are thousands of languages.
 4. Novice users and others have problems keeping library versions current and sometimes multiple versions of the same library are needed.  This is often called dependency hell.

Those problems can be bad, but they don't explain my system.  I was seeing proliferation of libraries that were added just incase they were needed.

If we step back and think about this, it appears programmers are extending their language and programs by adding library functions.  Essentially, we are growing programming universes  via libraries.  Each universe continues to expand.  We have a Perl universe, a "C" universe, a open office universe, and so on.

All this growth is part of freedom and fits well with Linux philosophy.  It also is beginning to look like bloat and confusion.  At some point we might want to ask:  Do dynamic libraries have more disadvantages than advantages?  Can we improve all this and make Linux more efficient?

Responses to these questions seem to fall into two camps.  Those that view the basic system structure as sacred and untouchable.  Another group that see it as too difficult too change.  Both views ignore the problem.  I think we need to take a hard look at the data and generate some solutions.

What do you think?