“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general”
Note to 1-bit people: saying that &quot;X is not a good thing in general&quot;, is not the same as saying that &quot;X is a bad thing in general&quot;. All that&#x27;s being said here is &quot;tradeoffs exist&quot; and highlighting some issues some people apparently like to ignore.<p>One of my favorite libraries is SDL. Of course, when SDL2 came out, they moved away from the LGPL license to a more liberal zlib license, which allows static linking without infecting the license of your project. Great, except now as years go by and games are abandoned, they stop working in new environments, or at least don&#x27;t work as well, and you can&#x27;t just force in a new dynamic version of SDL to save things like you used to be able to.<p>The solution they came up with: even if the program is static linked, the user can define an environmental variable to point to a dynamic lib and that will be used instead. Best of both worlds, at least going forward for programs that use a version of SDL2 that incorporates the feature. (Some more details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux_gaming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1upn39&#x2F;sdl2_adds_dynamic_api_magic_to_allow_updating_it&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux_gaming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1upn39&#x2F;sdl2_a...</a>)