Quote Originally Posted by crazycheese View Post
They are *not designed* to be compatible at ABI, just for the sake binary compatibility is reason for the mess we have in windows.
Linux implemented much more elegant solution, cutting the problem in the root.
So breaking things every six months for the sake of it is 'elegant,' nice. Now explain the mythical 'mess' of Windows support, that works fine for the majority of the planet,


No, windows has much more versions, but they happen to break when running pre-pre-version and happen to need 9000 versions of older libraries, incl. bugs, incl. building functionality based on erratic behavior.
Wrong, Windows has three version. XP, Vista, and 7. Unless, of course, you are writing server software which in this context you clearly aren't. Granted it may be possible for an insane nutjob to develop against five different versions of the MS redistributable C++ library, but only an insane nutjob would do that.