Again, so do C compilers, so does Java, so does every language, even ones that "never break".

C11 removed gets, for example.

javac, gcc, and clang all support some form of -std=<lang_level>, and ABI/source interop between code that uses different language versions.

The post-gcc 2.95 C++ ABI breakage was pretty suck, though.

[edit]

And please don't misinterpret my criticism as intentional FUD.

I work on $MAJOR_OS and am achingly tired of writing C, so I keep my eye on Rust as one possible salvation, once it's had time to mature.

It's just a very hard sell when there's no ABI stability, we're talking about code that's expected to last for decades, etc.

It's all good. I hear you. We'll get there :) It took C what, 17 years or something to have ABI stability?

As I explained, those are only "breaking changes" in the sense that some code might break in practice, not that we changed the language definition.

GCC did not provide a switch to get the old copy constructor behavior back when they made it stricter and broke my code.