Versioning of shared objects

Versioning of shared objects

Note that libc handles versioning well because the glibc maintainers do a lot of hard and non-trivial work to have things like compatibility symbols so that you can swap to a later glibc without breakage. You can do a similar level of work in Rust today to get dynamic linking working, and working well.

What C has that Rust doesn't is that it's fairly trivial to take a C library, build it into a .so, and have it work as long as upstream doesn't make a silently breaking change (which can result in UB, rather than a failure); it's also fairly simple to patch the build system so that the .so is versioned downstream of the library authors, so that they are ignorant of the use as a shared library. This is being worked on for Rust, but the goal in Rust is to ensure that any breaking changes upstream result in a failure to dynamically link, rather than a risk of UB.