Why does FontForge load libraries at run time rather than being linked with them?
I dislike dependencies. The fewer the better. I hate when I download a package and discover it won’t work unless I download half a dozen other packages (which, in their turn may demand that I download yet more packages). I want to download a package and just have it work. So I try to write as much code myself as I can and release it all together in a lump and not force people to wander all over the web looking for disparate parts. When I can’t figure out how to do something myself I will use an external library if I must. Even then I will try to insure that fontforge will run if the library is not present on a system. When I release a binary package I don’t want to have to release 32 packages per host depending on the possible presence or absence of 5 different libraries. But I also don’t want to force someone to install a library that s/he will never use just to get fontforge to start. If a user will never look at an svg glyph then they don’t need to install libxml2. If the user will
