There were two motivations for shared libraries; one no longer applies and the other, arguably was never reliable, so after 35 years of dynamic linking, a couple of years ago I went static only (except for system calls of course).
The first reason was disk space: object files could simply be smaller. Nowadays, for all intents and purposes, disk space is free and unlimited.
The second was the ability to ship fixes to system facilities. These were fragile, leading to even more complex methods such as versioning, so though this was a good idea in principle, in practice it was very painful. I believe the Windows folks had their own name for it, "DLL Hell". The npm people still suffer from this from time to time, sometimes notoriously.
As for the fixes: software isn't updated on magtape any more, and most systems have robust upgrade systems. In addition there are all manner of quasi-hermetic isolation systems (VMs, docker images, venvs and the like) so why not just ship a static binary?
Plus with a static binary, if you really care about order of loading/unloading etc (which you ideally shouldn't) its trivial to manage with a custom linker script.
My only exception to this is the kernel: it can be upgraded, and mostly promises not to vary system call semantics too much, so it's OK to me not to link the kernel into my binary :-).
The first reason was disk space: object files could simply be smaller. Nowadays, for all intents and purposes, disk space is free and unlimited.
The second was the ability to ship fixes to system facilities. These were fragile, leading to even more complex methods such as versioning, so though this was a good idea in principle, in practice it was very painful. I believe the Windows folks had their own name for it, "DLL Hell". The npm people still suffer from this from time to time, sometimes notoriously.
As for the fixes: software isn't updated on magtape any more, and most systems have robust upgrade systems. In addition there are all manner of quasi-hermetic isolation systems (VMs, docker images, venvs and the like) so why not just ship a static binary?
Plus with a static binary, if you really care about order of loading/unloading etc (which you ideally shouldn't) its trivial to manage with a custom linker script.
My only exception to this is the kernel: it can be upgraded, and mostly promises not to vary system call semantics too much, so it's OK to me not to link the kernel into my binary :-).