alt Hacker News> A static library is nothing but a bundle of object files, wrapped in an ancient and never-quite-standardized archive format.
To this day I'm astonished that it's not just tar. Or pax. Or even cpio! Or literally any file format that has any other use.
tar/pax are kind of terrible formats. They are hard to implement correctly. I'm glad they are not used more often.
cpio is pretty reasonable though.
zip is actually pretty great and I've been growing increasingly fond of it over the years.