Thanks for your informative reply. I'm not much of a Java programmer (my experience is mainly C and more recently C++, plus a lot of traditional scripting langu

Thanks for your informative reply. I'm not much of a Java programmer (my experience is mainly C and more recently C++, plus a lot of traditional scripting languages) - when you say C++ knows what's linked from another library, are you referring to the dynamic linking process, where ld at least looks at all the libraries and resolves the references at link time, is that correct? Whereas Java has to resolve all its references to stuff in .jar files at runtime?