Hence why I explicitly mentioned Linux.

Also Aix uses the same model as Windows.

Finally, .NET Assemblies are versioned, and Microsoft has introduced Application Manifests around Windows XP.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/sbscs/appli...

So it a matter of actually taking the effort of specifying the versions that the application works with.

> Finally, .NET Assemblies are versioned,

But then, you still have to put up with defining potentially hundreds of <bindingRedirect>s in config files to even get an application to run correctly, even though they mostly don't share their DLLs.

The only thing it takes is Nuget dowloading a newer version of some dependency another library depends on, even if it's backwards compatible with the old API. Which, of course, it should always be if you haven't switched to a new major version.

Edit: Also, I find it very disturbing that the resulting errors always happen to be crashes during runtime instead of up-front. If that happens with a plugin or through reflection: fine. But for most of .NET code, dependencies should be able to be loaded during startup.

All assemblies are versioned and can potentially have unique strong names, not just .NET assemblies. A native DLL can still be an assembly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly