It can, and that's what I did. But I decided to experiment, and there is some little benefit - less memory usage, and supposedly malloc() from one place can be

It can, and that's what I did. But I decided to experiment, and there is some little benefit - less memory usage, and supposedly malloc() from one place can be freed() by another (or I think so). A lot of Microsoft products are still linking to it. At work we don't care and link to whatever latest MSVC provides, but for certain products to write plugins we have to use the exact same Visual Studio version (for example Autodesk Maya or MotionBuilder). There are way too many subtle details (and more complicated with Windows's manifests, side by side assemblies and crap like that).