[versteegen]

Does FPC avoid using versioned symbols from glibc that would prevent it from running on distros without a recent glibc, unlike any C/C++ program compiled using system libc headers?

This is a particular problem with recent Slackware-current: I used to compile portable x86/64 linux binaries (from C+C++ sources or from FreeBASIC compiled to C) by patching out those versioned symbols using ld --wrap= flags, but since glibc 2.34 even that no longer works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32479545

[badsectoracula]

I think there was some effort to allow specifying versioned symbols or something along these lines that was inspired by some breakage introduced by a recent glibc, but i don't know where that went.

However the safe and really recommended approach is to link against older libraries (easiest way is to use a VM running an older Linux distro), like with C and C++. Free Pascal is largely self-contained so Free Pascal on an older distro is trivial and even if you have to build from source it is just a couple of commands.