> Shipping in C:\\Program Files\\Your Name is standard with Windows applications; DLLs aren't shared between different applications like in Linux, so there's no

> Shipping in C:\\Program Files\\Your Name is standard with Windows applications; DLLs aren't shared between different applications like in Linux, so there's no reason to use them. Win32 and CRT (libc) is shared among programs, .NET framework DLLs are also shared. Industrial software does ship multiple .exes that depend on the same subset of DLLs. Anything that uses registered COM interfaces also use shared pages for the DLLs in memory. > Additionally, the Windows dynamic loader doesn't squish all DLLs into one global namespace like the Linux one does. Every time you call a function from a DLL there is extra friction, even for the programmer. This is an advantage of Windows over Linux where those squish into one unified namespace create compatibility problems and force the programmer to compile everything as a one single big universe / distro. It basically makes long-term backwards compat impossible. Compile-time linked DLLs have no significant overhead compared to Linux after they are loaded and the loader has done its relocation work. > There's also the libc linking problem. Each DLL may get its own copy for libc, either because they are statically linked or because they are compiled with different versions. If you try to fopen in one DLL and fclose in another, or malloc in one and free in another, it's liable to crash. This might've been solved in the 20 years since I learned about it, though. This still kinda exists. However, Microsoft hasn't broken their CRT ABI since 2015. It is a feature not a bug IMO. All properly made libraries ship their own allocation and free functions for this very reason. It is not specific to Windows. This does happen with Linux shared libraries when they use their custom allocators. Giving up the ability to link with different libc versions, ability to link with multiple versions of the same library or good backwards compatibility is not a good tradeoff just to have a single global `malloc / free` call.