it used to be split out a long time ago. it was a fricking nightmare of deps and came with so many restrictions, because ELF cannot distinguish between public APIs to everyone, and public APIs towards a certain set of of libraries. i.e. anything a library exports is *always* public for anyone, thus you can never provide a simple helper for your own higher level libraries only, you must *always* commit to it's ABI stability if you do.
Hence, sorry, fuck no. Never again.