It feels like your missing his point. OP is pointing out that static linking everything is necessarily unworkable. You're arguing that static linking isn't unworkable because you can just dynamic link. It doesn't respond meaningfully to the OP.

I may be totally misunderstanding asark, but the model I thought they were suggesting was something like how COM works in Windows. You can, for example, talk to other COM components and pass data back and forth using an efficient binary message passing protocol while still letting them live in their own process space.

It allowed some interesting things. For example, you could write applications that could read, display and modify the contents of Excel files, except they didn't do it directly; they delegated all the actual work of opening, reading, and modifying the *.xls file to Excel itself.

I wouldn't personally consider consuming a COM interface like that to be a form of linking.

That said, getting back to the broader context, I've no idea how you'd make something like that work for a GUI toolkit. But WinRT is supposedly based on COM, so maybe they got something figured out?

No, I'm arguing that including a manpage doesn't mean your program is now dynamically linked to the man command, or that receiving a .doc attachment in my email client doesn't mean my email client is now dynamically linked to a word processor. If you're going to call that dynamic linking then we've officially reductio'd this out of the realm of usefulness.