On most modern platforms the order where dependent libraries are listed has no effect on object generation. In theory, there are platforms that require libraries that provide missing symbols to other libraries to be listed after those libraries whose symbols they provide.
Particularly, if a pair of static archives each resolve some of the other’s symbols, it might be necessary to list one of those archives both before and after the other one. Libtool does not currently cope with this situation well, since duplicate libraries are removed from the link line by default. Libtool provides the command line option --preserve-dup-deps to preserve all duplicate dependencies in cases where it is necessary.