[jhare]

I disagree it's as simple as you suggest. Trouble seems to be that in a perfect world, you're right. It would be the same.

In the nasty real world, these build systems introduce more issues for more people. Then linking the shared object or DLL adds management issues, naming issues, arch etc. But that's for separate dependency building as a binary.

Has every one of these side compilation steps gone perfectly for you? No. At some point they wasted your time.

This concatenation-build step is done reliably beforehand, even if simple, can be assembled and be tested by the releasing party. Saves the user some trouble.

A pre-built binary is about as easy if done sensibly. Boost is mainly header only but has some libs still requiring linking, which requires you digging into that library's particulars.

All of those are steps that have tradeoffs in time, attention, flexibility and risk.

Careful of that word "... just". Just do this! I can just do that! The full hassle/cost requires pulling out of just the compile step, in this instance.

[int_19h]

I'm not talking about prebuilt binary libraries, much less DLLs. I'm comparing it to just dropping an .h and a .cpp file directly into your project. This one requires dropping an .h file, and then either adding a .cpp file (which you have to write manually, even if it's just one line of code), or adding an implementation #include to one of the existing .cpp files.

I guess my point is that I just don't see the benefit of concatenation here.