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.