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That's just, like, your opinion, man; tell it to the retrocomputing folks.

IMHO, the reluctance to "finish" a project and the stigma against something being "in maintenance mode" is responsible for most of the bloat and messes in modern software. Perhaps it's related to "CADT": http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

It's also, ironically, the cause of numerous security flaws. Maybe we wouldn't have to worry so much about security flaws in our libraries if we weren't constantly tearing them down and remaking them.

Regardless, in the case of libc, I genuinely cannot think of a reason to break binary compatibility, backwards or forward. The POSIX standard is set in stone, the interfaces are stable, the data types are opaque, etc. Of course you can create new implementations of memcpy etc that take advantage of new instruction sets, but I don't see why you need to break binary compatibility to do so.

It's a libc implementation for christ's sake. If ever a library should remain in stasis, it would be a libc implementation.

Chill out. I didn't say dynamic linking was "good" or "bad," or that it isn't right to put security first, just that this isn't as great of a benefit as it appears to be if library devs aren't careful to preserve binary compatibility (which most, in my experience, aren't).

I agree, and I think this approach works very well on Windows, where Microsoft has a serious commitment to backwards compatibility at any cost. But in my experience, there wasn't anywhere near the same level of appreciation for binary compatibility in the Linux userland (though Torvalds clearly cares about this in the kernel).

Guess I was wrong about glibc, so I removed that from the comment. I seem to remember fairly frequent full system updates, with it as the center, when I used Linux, but it might have been another library at fault.

Dynamic linking ends up being a wash or a net negative for # of recompiles when you consider that developers of important dynamic libraries break binary compatibility all the time on non-security-related changes.