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They're not bundling libX11, etc in any case, only SDL. So I don't see why it matters that SDL in turn depends on other system components. Presumably it's looking for said components in a way that works on all the distros they tested. So for the specific libraries that they're dealing with in the blog post (libc and SDL), static linking would probably be easier than what they're doing.

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It doesn't particularly matter, I'm just addressing a common misconception. Dynamic linking doesn't have to happen only at build time and it doesn't have to depend on any particular symbols being present. Even if you static link your libc and SDL, you're still likely going to be doing some dynamic linking at runtime, and in most cases this is probably what you want. You just don't have to handle it yourself because it's implemented within SDL -- it handles all the version detection logic at runtime for you and can decide how to handle things based on the existence of some symbols, so with that it's possible to support multiple version of the same dynamic library, within the same program, and without a recompile.

Exactly, alternatives to dynamic linking can go either way: static linking if you make decisions earlier or dynamic loading (via libdl) if you make decisions later.

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