On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 16:30, Jonathan Wakely <cxx_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 14:23, Ville Voutilainen wrote:
>>
>> The situation gets even more tragic when we're talking about a
>> possible ABI break in the system C library, instead of a C++ library.
>> Now you have *every* user depending on it, and for even more of them,
>> the idea of having to recompile C code is completely foreign,
>> when they program in python or whichever language that might not even
>> use glue libraries to talk to C++ code, but will use the C library.
>
>
> "Sorry you can't play any of your Steam games / use your device drivers, we changed the size of libc's time_t to avoid the epochalypse. Can you ask those companies to recompile all their binaries for you? What do you mean they went out of business 10 years ago and nobody has the code? Wow, sucks to be you."

There's an important bit of wisdom there. Most of my remarks are about
what ABI breaks do to smaller software houses. What Mr. Wakely
points out there is that they hurt end users, and most of those don't
know what "recompiling" is. BigInternetCompanies don't *have*
end users for their C++ code, their end users use something quite different.