Shared Libraries

Why are shared libraries so complex and brain dead? I mean, in order to get it working properly you have to sprinkle every one of your functions with __attribute__((visibility(public)) and set the  default visibility to hidden via a compiler switch. That amount of complexity just doesn't seem worth it.

I originally tried to make one my libraries efficiently support shared library builds, but I'm fucking done, after several days of trying to get it to work, the amount of time I've put into this effort, and the amount of time I'm going to have to waste maintaining it is just not going to pay off for me.

Dynamic Linking on Windows is pretty fine, but if you go into versioning it can get a bit messy if you don't know what you're doing. I tend to prefer it to static linking as it leads to small binaries and binary modularity where you could replace some module with an improved version without having to replace the whole thing.