It's been awhile since I've mucked about with these sorts of things, but I'm glad that my thought about that is confirmed: if static linking only brings in used functions, why doesn't dynamic loading do the same (it does, apparently)? Much of this railing against dynamic loading wasting resources seems like complaining about the wrong things, either bad dynamic linkers, or bad libraries, neither of which will be fixed by static linking.
Don't get me wrong, there are places I think that static linking is ideal. I wish more distributors of binary only software would statically link, or at least include standalone required dynamic libraries, rather than rely on system dynamic libraries.
I wish them luck in their experiment and hope they can improve static linking, but I suspect they will learn more about why dynamic loading "wastes" so many resources the more they come in contact with real world libraries.
