[ben-schaaf]

> even though the conversation was about ARM.

Apologies, I wanted to be specific which standard is being followed. Nonetheless afaik the ABI is the same for all arm distros.

>> with very few problems beyond using a symbol that doesn't exist on older distros. > ... Oh, I shouldn't even need to explain it, because you're already aware of it.

A missing symbol is a problem regardless of where you're compiling. If you're linking against something that doesn't exist it'll fail; whether that's on your client's machine running an old distro or when you're compiling on that old distro yourself. You could argue it's better to fail early here, but the work in fixing this bug is approximately the same.

> I'm amazed I even have to argue about such basic knowledge. If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe OSDev?

OSDev is incorrect here. Take it from GNU themselves: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/abi.html. Symbols in libgcc are versioned; either your code runs and links against the exact correct version or it fails. If you want to run on old distros with libgccs that don't have newer symbols either use an older gcc, statically link libgcc or use clang.