John,

>>Agreed. Remember the way Clipper used to do it? If I recall, product functionality was split between a basic and extended libs. You linked in what you needed and the langref mentioned which lib each command and function was in.

Well, MTDLL was the first time (other than ODBC driver) that I've seen commands and functions removed to eliminate backward compatibility, such as @ SAY, etc. Maybe a choice of different runtimes at compile time could be extended in the future to further slim things down.