Outside of OS distro packaging, most Qt apps actually copy dynamically linked Qt binaries to the same app folder for re-distribution to end users within some fo

Outside of OS distro packaging, most Qt apps actually copy dynamically linked Qt binaries to the same app folder for re-distribution to end users within some form of installer or disk image. The same probably applies to Gtk apps too, as I think the last time I manually installed Gtk for Windows for a Gtk app was a decade ago. Dynamic linking only works if you can guarantee ABI stability and folks haven’t had to deal with ABI changes since C++13 to the point where if the C++ folks can’t change the ABI by C++23 we will forget it was ever a problem because we’ll make the cost of change too hard. And the current C++ ABI currently makes some parts of C++ executables sub-optimal unless you hunt down your own standard-library alternatives. Additionally, with dynamic linking, both code authors and code users now need to agree on versions to support under assumptions that newer features in newer libraries aren’t worth adopting quickly. To that end, some OSes do update dynamic libraries more quickly, but doing so theoretically requires a lot more recompilation and potentially you’re downloading the same binaries more than once. At that point, dynamic linking is worth less than a binary-optimized compression algorithm, no? Especially for distributing changes to said executables. Which isn’t to say, for OS distros, that dynamic linking is bad, far from it, it tends to be the only valid solution for programming against OS core components, but that in our haste to update dynamic libraries independently of code compiled for them, we tend to forget ABI compatibility and the costs to maintain API compatibility across a wide variety of dependency versions for packagers and developers (or alternatively, the lack of updates to new library features for end users). Windows APIs never changing is the reason Windows stagnates more than macOS, where Apple is less afraid to say your older app simply won’t run any longer. Linux suffers less from this, but as pointed out in the email, part of that is because POSIX implementations are relatively stable over decades, whether or not significant improvements are still possible for more modern UX or security, for example. The details of dynamic linking on OS platforms can be found in this recent series of posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23059072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23059072 (in terms of stability guarantees besides libc dynamic linking)