All immediate reference relocations must be carried out during process initialization before the application gains control. However, any lazy reference relocations can be deferred until the first instance of a function being called. Immediate relocations typically result from data references. Therefore, reducing the number of data references also reduces the runtime initialization of a process.
Initialization relocation costs can also be deferred by converting data references into function references. For example, you can return data items by a functional interface. This conversion usually results in a perceived performance improvement because the initialization relocation costs are effectively spread throughout the process's execution. Some of the functional interfaces might never be called by a particular invocation of a process, thus removing their relocation overhead altogether.
The advantage of using a functional interface can be seen in the section, Copy Relocations. This section examines a special, and somewhat expensive, relocation mechanism employed between dynamic executables and shared objects. It also provides an example of how this relocation overhead can be avoided.