Java has the possibility of maintaining ABIs as well. And I imagine that's what .Net assembles are about too. I think you're heavily over stating reliance on l

Java has the possibility of maintaining ABIs as well. And I imagine that's what .Net assembles are about too. I think you're heavily over stating reliance on libraries having stable ABIs as an anti-pattern. If a mistake is made in the ABI promise, can it get hairy? Absolutely. If you work on an application and are somewhere in the middle of it and need to recompile it to test a fix, do you want to wait for the compilation of the entire application to test it? Obviously not.