I believe that compilation problems you describe are caused by Microsoft's development tools (and by some weird quirks of Windows as a platform) and not by C/C+

I believe that compilation problems you describe are caused by Microsoft's development tools (and by some weird quirks of Windows as a platform) and not by C/C++ itself. Every time I build something for Windows I get this feeling that it's actually hostile to code reuse across projects and that is the case even in .NET. Getting right import libraries (what are they for, anyway?) and getting IDE to actually know that you intend to link something/use some assembly seems horribly complicated in contrast to unix's #include <foo.h> and ld ... -lfoo Also, having five different almost-compatible ABIs for C is something that really helps C/C++ programmers, especially in environment where it is common to ship compiled binaries, that are often very hard to rebuild from scratch.