I'm not referring to dynamic or static linking in particular, I'm just talking about linking in general.
It is possible to access a shared library without linking, via dlopen() on *nix and something else on Windows I suppose (QLibrary hides this). The idea is to load the shared library at runtime and resolve exported symbols on the fly. This way the program can be run with or without the shared library. Resolving will just fail if the library doesn't exist, and the particular feature can be left out. But if you link to a library, the library needs to exist in order to launch the application.
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