I think Borland C++ did all the above in the 90s, having to manually tell GCC which libraries to link against (and with even in the "correct" order!) was someth

I think Borland C++ did all the above in the 90s, having to manually tell GCC which libraries to link against (and with even in the "correct" order!) was something i found baffling back when i first tried MinGW. Though it did help that all libraries and headers are part of the compiler itself. And perhaps it was using something like MSVC's #pragma comment(lib, "libname") (which i really wish GCC/Clang would implement at some point as it is very convenient) in every header it came with to properly associate with the relevant library, though i'm almost sure i replaced the OpenGL headers it came with and recreated the .lib file to be more complete (the default had only OpenGL 1.0 symbols) yet it still found the new stuff.