I primarily had servers in mind. That said, a self-contained executable is super-easy to distribute to a user: They download the executable and then they run i

I primarily had servers in mind. That said, a self-contained executable is super-easy to distribute to a user: They download the executable and then they run it. No need for an installer. When they don't want it anymore they can delete it. That's actually pretty great. That said obviously if you are using some sort of package manager anyway then the benefits are greatly decreased -- effectively, the package becomes the self-contained unit of deployment. The benefit of a self-contained executable is more for cases where bringing in a package manager would create a lot of extra work or if requiring the user to use some particular package manager would be an unacceptable limitation. > it is unclear where the symbol names come from in your example I'm not the author of the article. The symbol name is based on the file name of the input data. This is my least-favorite part of this linker feature -- I have looked for a way to specify a different symbol name but haven't been able to find one. But in any case, yes, different input files will get different symbol names.