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My recent favorite is WinSxS - it's the folder that makes total sense on WinRT/Pro devices... not!

Okay, it's sounds like a fine idea - having multiple DLL versions, allowing applications to link to them. But look, the idea of DLL was to save memory, where two or more applications accessing them would reuse the same hw memory (if they are not relocated). Now maybe on modern PC's that doesn't matter much (although it's still problematic if two MSVCRT libs are used from two different DLLs).

Anyway, but on mobile devices - memory and storage space are important - so make sure all your apps use the same DLL, so you don't lose to storage space, and it's loaded only once (virtually for every process, but due to COW only once in memory).

Have fun, go to Best Buy/Costco/anywhere where they sell the Windows RT/Pro tablets. Go to the command prompt (cmd.exe), c:\windows\winsxs, and type "dir /s" - you can see how much space is wasted there. And this would get even more and more with more updates coming.




To be fair, dir /s vastly overerstimates the storage use of WinSxS. That directory contains multiple hardlinks to every physical file, and dir /s doesn't handle those properly.




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