The last time I was forced to deal with such a proprietary SDK (that required an ancient Windows C++ runtime, and segfaulted like crazy, natch), rather than waste months reverse-engineering it, I wrapped it in a separate process and talked to it via IPC. That got the job done, and every time their shitty code locked up or crashed, I just restarted the wrapper process from the main application.

Serialized data over stdin/stdout is becoming my favorite protocol for ABI compatibility.

The amount of problems this solves is incredible, and it creates none of the ops issues with configuring and launching some new kind of Docker image.