hah, yeah that probably describes my approach this time around. for darktable it was the opposite: i started with a cannibalised libufraw0.so (never mind the processing, i want a combined user interface …).
bloatware 
but yes, should be relatively straight forward to compile vkdt into a library. basically the command line interface does this, but without the library part (just compiles everything in). at least i could then always point to you if i get user interface feature requests 
