On Mon, 2025-06-09 at 16:56 -0300, Thiago Macieira via Std-Proposals
wrote:
> On Monday, 9 June 2025 16:28:51 Brasilia Standard Time Avi Kivity via
> Std-
> Proposals wrote:
> > Acknowledged. But today, such users can be moved to containers, and
> > I
> > don't see that a 10-year-old program needs a 1-day-old compiler. I
> > think a 10-year deprecation cycle for ABIs is reasonable - an ABI
> > lives
> > for 20 years, and 10 years into its life we launch the next
> > generation
> > with accumulated fixes.
>
> But the 1-year-old application will need to deal with two ABIs.


Why? An application deals with one ABI. At some points in its evolution
it will need to switch, but that's a matter of updating dependencies
and compiler flags.

A library vendor will need to deal with two ABIs (if it is distributed
as a binary).