You can't ship reasonable plugin for most of the popular content creation tools - be it audio, video effects, 3d modelling, etc. without support for dynamic/shared libs.

Okay, maybe you can - at the risk of performance cost - e.g. your out-of process plugin that need to move data in/out with a cost, and then it over complicates - because the plugin process might've died - how do you restart it, how do you get it back to state, etc. etc. You just don't have to solve this with .dll or .so

Cross process shared memory is a thing on Unix so there is no need for the performance cost of copying across a pipe. Sure you have to manage if it dies, but you have to manage it crashing you in the dl case.

malkia

But you don't have only Linux, you have (and probably first) OSX and/or Windows and then Linux, and you need an API that works well in that case. Being an in-process dll/so plugin, while fraught with perils gets you to avoid other issues (state, health, restart, identity, etc.)

Also sometimes you don't have a choice, but have to make a dll, for example:

https://github.com/steinbergmedia/vst3sdk or https://ae-plugins.docsforadobe.dev/ and many others. Sometimes it's the only viable choice.

(I wish most have used grpc/flatbuffers/whatever to communicate, but then every RPC call have to be checked/retried/handled, and or shared memory well handled, with (?) locks, etc. - not a trivial thing for someone who is deeply specialized in making a very good effect/renderer/etc instead of dealing with this extra complexity on top).