[Joker_vD]

> This is a contrived example akin to "what if I only know the name of the function at runtime and have to dlsym()"?

Well, you just do what the standard Linux loader does: iterate through the .so's in your library path, loading them one by one and doing dlsym() until it succeeds :)

Okay, the dynamic loader actually only tries the .so's whose names are explicitly mentioned as DT_NEEDED in the .dynamic section but it still is an interesting design choice that the functions being imported are not actually bound to the libraries; you just have a list of shared objects, and a list of functions that those shared objects, in totality, should provide you with.