[steerablesafe]

I agree that there is little reason to not use a newer compiler to target an older distro, but there is one issue: the standard library. With newer language versions the standard library also grows. Older distros ship with older standard libraries, and they probably don't have the newer language facilities in them.

At work we sidestep this by building the new C++ standard library implementation against an old libc, and ship it with our product. I can imagine that this could be problematic for other software though, especially ones that normally ship with the disto.

[jcelerier]

> I can imagine that this could be problematic for other software though, especially ones that normally ship with the disto.

why would it be an issue ? that's how pretty much every software does on Windows and most certainly people can agree that things are much more sane there for the end-users

[steerablesafe]

This is not a technical issue. But if you aim for the software to be packaged in official distro repositories, they possibly don't want you to have other backported dependencies, such as a new version of libstdc++, or you to vendor in those libraries.