DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

It's a trade-off. Shared linking forces you to consider backwards and forwards compatibility in your ABI, where static linking permits you to get away with only caring about API.

Static linking also enables library consumers to simply test for the behaviour they expect; with shared linking, you need to be confident that the set of library behaviour you depend upon is by design, and not a happy accident. If you don't take the ABI contracts seriously (on either side of the ABI), then you get broken by mistake as an implementation detail you happened to care about changes.

Tooling to help get this right sort-of exists (abidiff for example), but it's more than just the things that can be checked by tooling that matter - for example, if I change a library so that you now need to call mylib_free on a pointer I returned, where previously free worked, you're going to be surprised.