[ddulaney]

I’m not OP, but at $WORK we sell a C++ library. We want to make it as easy as possible for clients to integrate it into their existing binaries. We need to be able to integrate with CMake, Meson, vcxproj, and hand-written Makefiles. We’re not the only vendor: if another vendor is using a specific cURL version, you better hope we work with it too, otherwise integration is almost impossible.

You could imagine us shipping our library as a DLL/.so and static-linking libcurl, but that comes with a bunch of its own problems.

[nly]

Exactly this. You don't want multiple versions of cURL loaded in to your process dynamically.

You need to be in control of the final link if you're shipping a .a to other teams

[progval]

That doesn't work if other teams want to apply their own cURL patches, or update as soon as upstream publishes new security fixes without waiting for you.