[account42]

Unix/ELF doesn't have seperate .lib and .dll files - you link directly against the .so (or a linker script, but those are typically only used for special system libraries). The main thing this does is record the name from the DT_SONAME field of the .so as a requied dependency in your binary.

But I also don't think that this would be a problem on Windows. After all, you can generally replace DLLs with entirely different versions and you'll be fine as long as all the required symbols are present and ABI-compatible.

The main difference between ELF and PE dynamic linking is that with PE you have a list of required symbols along with the libraries to load those symbols from while with ELF you have a list of required libraries and a list of required symbols but not information recorded about which symbols should come from which libraries.