Two findings regarding the new "semi-static linking" options:

Distutils now creates libraries (.lib) that "may not be readable by subsequent versions of Visual C++" <https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0zza0de8.aspx>.

Build times and static library sizes significantly increase to a point where it becomes impractical in some cases. For example, on my system, the zeromq package builds in 90 s on Python 3.4.3, while on Python 3.5rc1 it takes 470 s. Building HDF5 static libs with the new options takes 30 minutes (close to 100% CPU usage on 8 logical processors) compared to less than 5 minutes for the default options.