Just asking as I don’t have that much knowledge about static and dynamic linking: When you link statically my understanding was that the compiler directly integrates the implementations of the directly or indirectly used functions and other symbols into the resulting binary but ignores everything else. Wouldn’t that mean that it is either smaller over all or at least as small as a dynamic library + executable? Because the dynamic library obviously has to contain every implementation as it doesn’t know about the executables of the system.

So the only way where using static linking results in overall bigger sizes than dynamic linking would be many (at least 2) executables using the same library. And you even said that you only use one algorithm from a big library so static should be way smaller than dynamic even with many executables.

When you meant memory usage then I thought that dynamic libraries would have to be completely preloaded because you can’t know which function will be needed in the near future and just in time loading would be way too slow while static binaries will only load what will be needed as I understand it.