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by geezerjay 2716 days ago
> Isn't every developer in a non-trivial software project a library developer? As soon as you have a common piece of functionality you want to reuse - that's a library.

A library, specially a C++ library, is way more than reusable code. Developing a library requires the developer to spend time making fundamental design decisions that he doesn't have to make when developing a module lost somewhere within a project tree, such as how to organize the project into interface and private source files, how the lib should be deployed, how to meet upstream dependencies, how to not break compatibility with previous releases while making your code resilient to subsequent changes, how to add metadata to your project, how to handle optional features, etc etc etc.