Well, you complained about ambiguity in the search process during build, and referencing by path is how to fix that. Regarding runtime, we absolutely do not wa

Well, you complained about ambiguity in the search process during build, and referencing by path is how to fix that. Regarding runtime, we absolutely do not want to implicitly embed build paths. As others have said because it's unlikely we will put them in the same place, and it's unlikely we will build and run on the same systems. The runtime library management system is going to have a structure for where to place libraries. It may be as simple as tossing them in /usr/lib, or it may be somthing where we have different paths for each application. We can't do this if the compiler implicitly dictates universal linker paths. One aspect I think you may also be missing is that shared objects themselves have DT_NEEDED and rpaths. You would quickly run into very confusing conflicts between binaries built on different systems, or with different build environments. It's hard to see a problem here, since adding an rpath is very easy. You appear to be asking for implicit, hidden behavior in the compiler which doesn't fit the vast majority of use cases.