Libtool attempted (badly) to solve portability problems between the diverse range of linkers on 90s Unix platforms. Its versioning scheme is utterly insane. I

Libtool attempted (badly) to solve portability problems between the diverse range of linkers on 90s Unix platforms. Its versioning scheme is utterly insane. It made a slightly difficult problem incredibly complex, and for no good reason. Every current platform of note has a perfectly good linker, making libtool redundant. More often than not, it's been an "anti-portability" impediment when it thinks it knows how to drive modern linkers but because it's barely maintained, it gets it wrong by trying to be too clever. Even proprietary embedded toolchains come with full-fat ELF linkers these days. Of all of the pieces which make up the Autotools, libtool is the one which could be dropped today with zero impact. It's the least useful and the least necessary of them all.