How does introducing a new shared library format that supports automatic bidirectional linking (as in Unix) break backwards compatibility? Nobody says they have to stop supporting DLLs. Just provide something better in addition to DLLs...
Despite disliking many of the Win32 "features", I see no problem with the way DLLs work. As for dynamic linking, you can do everything what *nix systems do, the only problem is that it is not the *nix way. If MS would introduce something better than DLL mechanism, new applications using it would not work on older systems like WinXP or Win2000. This sounds like breaking the backward compatibility to me. I think this thread wins the 1st prize for posts per second. Looks like every mailing list or newsgroup has to have a win vs nix discussion at some point. -- cundo
