Is it bad practice to have an application which ships with lots of DLL's?

Is it better to have lots of DLL dependencies or better to static link as mich a开发者_运维知识库s possible?

Thanks

No, it is not bad practice to ship with lots of DLLs; it is bad practice, though, to put them in %System32%. Actually, it is usually good to use DLLs instead of statically linking; for one thing, you can easily swap out just the DLL that you need to update, rather than having to replace the entire binary, and for another, if your program eventually needs multiple executables that work together, you only pay for one copy of the DLL code (whereas, with static linking, you would end up duplicating the code that was common).

Having static link gives your app a large memory footprint, therefore having DLL's is better from that POV i.e. you only load what you need. Nowadays installations are normally done by an installer so it doesn't matter if you have lots of DLL's.

I don't think it's a bad practice. Look at Office or Adobe or any large-scale application. They end up with lots of DLLs -- because they otherwise would have to pack everything into a 100M+ exe.

Break things into DLL when you don't absolutely need them.

Generally speaking it is not a bad practice. It is better to split the code of a program into separated dynamic libraries, especially if the functions provided are used from more than one executable. That doesn't mean that every program should have its code split in more dynamic libraries; for simple utilities, that is not probably needed.

As mentioned by others, lots of DLLs is not a bad practice. Put some thought into what to put in each one. I like to keep the DLLs as 'tiny-island-ish' as I can. If these will be distributed, I like to have a specific naming convention that reflects the product and/or company name and/or initials of some sort.

Just wanted to add another observation from other programs that use many dynamically loaded DLLs. For example, the GIMP and its plug-ins. The way you load your DLLs will affect your client's perceived application speed, if that's a factor among the other very good ones (updates, reuse, etc.). I'm sure there's some overhead for the OS to load a DLL and you might run into process limits (like open file handles). Having very many very small DLLs might not be as desired as "smaller than that" number of "larger than that"-sized DLLs.