The trouble with symbolic links

I think this overstates the amount of applications for which it actually matters. All you actually need to prevent symlink attacks is... other/untrusted users can't write to the directories you deal with or their parents. Which is the case for most applications: the directory they're operating in is owned by the user they're running as, and all of its parent directories are owned by the same user (or root).

The most common case that brings symlink attacks into possibility, I think, is an application which runs as root and does operations in (for example) /tmp or another world-writeable directory. Other than that it's really only multi-user servers that matter. (For example, Apache was mentioned in the comments: Apache only has to care about symlinks because it's not running as the same user who owns the website-files, and could therefore read files that the user can't.)