Why isn't all code compiled position independent?

Question

When compiling shared libraries in gcc the -fPIC option compiles the code as position independent. Is there any reason (performance or otherwise) why you would not compile

Answer 1

Yes there are performance reasons. Some accesses are effectively under another layer of indirection to get the absolute position in memory.

There is also the GOT (Global offset table) which stores offsets of global variables. To me, this just looks like an IAT fixup table, which is classified as position dependent by wikipedia and a few other sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Position_independent_code