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Is it possible to load the dynamic libraries before fork()ing and somehow prevent the path lookup and library loading? This will open up new possibilities for hardened security models.

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That's a fun idea but take python (very familiar)... It's very deeply dynamic and even if yu run imports at the top of your code yu still have many large libs with lazy code execution baked deep inside their internal functions so that assumes yu actually know what code paths the application will hit later. More importantly this goes in the opposite direction of Python's lazy imports thingy.. basically you've got a bomb and yu wouldn't wanna do that. Also, imagine the startup time for large apps. I'd just put a statically-linked binary in front and proxy back to the dynamically-linked process if I can't rewrite the main app in something like Go or Rust.

You explicitly stated as such, I just want to emphasize it again: it only breaks dynamically linked libraries, which - from a stability point of view - is an antipattern anyway.

Almost always youre better off producing a bundle which has everything (excluding the runtime) included... Or just use better languages which categorically don't even have this scenario, eg golang, Java, rust, etc pp

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