Yes, but it is still a dependency. By which I mean the software won't run if you don't supply the necessary thing at resolution time (which is possibly quite la

Yes, but it is still a dependency. By which I mean the software won't run if you don't supply the necessary thing at resolution time (which is possibly quite late: well into runtime, if you are on a system with lazy linking). Go (and some other languages, like OCaml) enforces that such dependencies form a DAG: C++ does not. I don't think this has much to do with compilation speed though.