There is a whole lot of industries based around shipping plugins. While some of these might work as external processes, they possibly still require some bridge

There is a whole lot of industries based around shipping plugins. While some of these might work as external processes, they possibly still require some bridge to be loaded as .dll, .so, .dylib. Also security updates. Other than that, static libs for the win. Other examples, speeding up "link" times - Chrome uses component builds - e.g. bundle a bunch of C++ code as .dll and compile/load only that, rather than relink the whole .exe - slower to start and use, but apparently allows you faster development. For what we do, we are using .dlls to enforce that certain C++ code (libs) are not suddenly using symbol from another lib if this was not intended (granted this could've been done if we compiled single .exe for the said lib, but gets the point). We also have mode where we use these .dlls instead of them being statically linked (having both).