[superkuh]

On the otherhand, if you're a user and not a developer, you know something written in bash will be written to run on any machine out there. Doesn't matter if it's old or new. Whereas if it's written in C++xx or Rust or the like it'll only compile/run on rolling release distros (or for the 3 months after a normal distro is released that it's up to date).

[nicoburns]

It might only compile on a machine with a recent compiler if it’s aggressive with using new language features, but why would need to compile a Rust/C++ version from source? A compiler binary will run jut fine on old distro versions.

[netheril96]

On old distros you need to install the latest libc and libstdc++/libc++ to run them. I’ve tried many times in the past and never succeeded.

[nicoburns]

Typically projects will compile the binaries on systems with a much older version of libc (but the latest compiler) specifically to avoid this problem.

If they’re not doing this then I believe they won’t work on older systems even if compiled with old compiler versions.

[steveklabnik]

Bash isn’t on non-UNIX machines by default. I could run a C or Rust produced binary just fine, but I couldn’t run that shell script.