One big executable or many small DLL's?

Question

Over the years my application has grown from 1MB to 25MB and I expect it to grow further to 40, 50 MB. I don\'t use DLL\'s, but put everything in this one big executable.

Answer 1

One big executable is definitely beneficial - you can have whole program optimization and less overhead and maintenance is much simpler.

As for the link time - you could have both the "many DLLs" and "one big executable" at the same time. For each DLL have a project configuration that builds a static library. So when you debug things you compile the "DLL" configuration of the project and when you need to ship you compile the "static library" configurations of your projects. Sometimes you will have different behavior in different configurations, but this will have to be addressed per incident.