Adam Jackson writes:
Most of the complexity in libtool (and autotools in general) is to
support systems that simply are not worth supporting and that
practically speaking don't exist anymore. I'm being slightly flip in
saying 'gcc -shared' but really not by much. Honestly for any fringe
platform the correct thing to do is port gcc/binutils/gmake first.
There's much more to libtool then just building shared libraries. If you
remove everything from libtool that supports ancient platforms, you'll still
have quite a bit left.
For example, libtool builds both shared and static libraries in parallel.
That, alone, saves you from dealing with a massive hairball in your
makefiles. Ask anyone who works on a large, complicated app, that links with
its own shared libraries. The option to easily build a statically-linked
version is quite invaluable, for debugging purposes.