I had the same problem building Kakoune on more elderly systems, and settled for building a static binary on my own machine that I could then run on shell accounts on other people's boxes if the toolchain isn't new enough to build in situ.
kak locates its runtime library relative to the binary path, so it works fine in ~/bin & ~/lib or ~/.local/bin & ~/.local/lib even if your home directory is different on different machines.
>This is annoying on professional VMs that are way behind the current version of gcc.
Get binary PKGSRC packages from Joyent and set PATH accordinly.
https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-linux/
It's for RHEL and clones but it should work on any parallel distro or more recent.
shameless plug for my tab manager plugin: https://github.com/enricozb/tabs.kak
disclaimer: I'm in the process of a decently sized refactor so the configuration instructions will soon be changed/outdated.
I find two annoying things :
- U need to make a lot of tuning to make it usable because there is now tab management, no clipboard, etc..
- U need always the last version of C++ compiler to make it compile. This is annoying on professional VMs that are way behind the current version of gcc.
I would suggest the community to make better documentation for plugin development which can be very hard to learn