@ned I(d rather see this as an evolution of Issue13631, as this solves a problem when libreadline and libedit are both loaded in the same executable. As such, using libedit instead of readline wouldn't solve the issue: what if the program Python is embeded in is linked to readline? I find python approach relatively elegant: detect the linked library at runtime and use the ad-hoc implementation based on this. An other option would be to dlopen readline using the RTLD_LOCAL flag, so that we get a better, non intrusive symbol resolution. What do you think?