On 08/25/2015 04:22 PM, John R Pierce wrote: > binary compatibility has /never/ been a goal of the linux/gpl > architects/authors. in fact, it seems like they make design decisions > to discourage it. I don't think that's true. Development in GNU/Linux is highly de-centralized, and some projects are better at stability than others. Linux has maintained an extremely stable interface for user-space applications. glibc uses versioned symbols for backward compatibility. The original question was about forward-compatibility, which is a much harder problem. Not all developers do as good a job with backward compatibility, but that problem is considerably more pronounced in the high level languages, where versioned libraries just aren't a thing. And that's why you see docker and other containers gaining traction, so that applications can be run in an environment with specific library versions.