Lennart Poettering on Nostr: systemd is often used in smaller environments, i.e run in containers, or in the ...

systemd is often used in smaller environments, i.e run in containers, or in the initrd or similar. Hence a large dependency tree is problematic.

Hence in systemd we started to turn a large number of our dependencies from regular ones to dlopen() ones: instead of always requiring some shared library we only load it the moment we need it. This means we can gracefully degrade our feature set if certain libraries are not available.