nyuriks

I see two points: safety - bigger supply chain attack surface, and code bloat/compiler performance. The later has been discussed in numerous posts here (the whole idea of a linker from the start was to get rid of unused functions, so not a big problem imo). The safety is a serious and legit consideration, but we also rely on Linux and build tools to build things. How do you know the compiler that was used to build Linux hasn't been compromised, perhaps several generations ago, and now your Linux has a backdoor that is not in Linux source code? There was a research paper on this IIRC. We trust the ecosystem to validate each tool we use. We just have to do the same with our own projects - only use what's relevant, and we should do dependency hygiene to check if it is coming from a reputable source...

Depends how you count - significant number of the staff (myself included) were first volunteers in the movement.