@lanodan @mischievoustomato @novenary @wolf480pl @hj .NET has some provisos for that (you can specify library versions in an assembly's dependency header), not sure what the JVM does, and you can do degredation in C but there is a caveat: you have to pull your stuff in with dlopen/dlsym or use compiler-specific shenanigans like the weak linker flag (JACK uses this.)

CLAP and LV2 also covered quite a bit of that, one by using just C constructs to get factories and the other using RDF graph manifests. LV2, kinda, ends up replicating .NET's metadata model but using rdf turtles instead of a bespoke binary format.

so.. it's all doable, its just that people who get paid to do it work on proprietary software where all the money is :comfywoozy: