Dealing with pre-compiled libs in the Visual Studio ecosystem is more complicated that you make it sound like. For a start there are 4 incompatible standard li

Dealing with pre-compiled libs in the Visual Studio ecosystem is more complicated that you make it sound like. For a start there are 4 incompatible standard libraries (dll vs static, debug vs optimized) and that's already a big headache. Also to a mix, a bunch of Visual Studio versions with enough difference to make it frequent that one compiled for e.g. 2010 doesn't work with 2015 or vice-versa. To me the nature of those small libraries (regardless of the number of source files) is that they are highly portable and designed to always be compiled from source code to prevent those issues.