The solution here is to build tooling to track dependencies in statically linked binaries. There is no inherent reason that has to be tightly coupled to the dyn

The solution here is to build tooling to track dependencies in statically linked binaries. There is no inherent reason that has to be tightly coupled to the dynamic dispatch model of shared objects. (In other words, the current situation is not an inherent fact about packaging. Rather, it is path-dependent.) For instance, many modern languages use techniques that are simply incompatible with dynamic dispatch. Some languages like Swift have focused on dynamic dispatch, but mostly because it was a fundamental requirement placed on their development teams by executives. While there is a place for dynamic dispatch in software, there is also no inherent justification for dynamic dispatch boundaries to be exactly at organizational ones. (For example, there is no inherent justification for the dynamic dispatch boundary to be exactly at the places a binary calls into zlib.) edit: I guess loading up a .so is more commonly called "dynamic binding". But it is fundamentally dynamic dispatch, ie figuring out what version of a function to call at runtime.