[chj]

"The reason why dynamic linking has been invented was not to decrease the general executable sizes or to save memory consumption, or to speed up the exec() -- but to allow changing code during runtime -- and that's the real purpose of dynamic linking, we shouldn't forget that."

Not sure about "changing code during runtime", but one of the great benefits of dynamic-link libraries are for writing plugins. And I don't think it would take much time for an app to look up its own plugin folder.