Of course, you both leave out that you could do it “on real hardware”.
But none of this matters. The real point is that you have to compile on an old distro. If he left out “in a VM”, you would have had nothing to correct.
But it's like complaining that you might need a VM or container to compile your software for Win16 or Win32s. Nobody is using those anymore. Nor really old Linux distributions. And if they do, they're not really going to complain about having to use a VM or container.
As C/C++ programmer, the thing I notice is ... the people who complain about this most loudly are the web dev crowd who don't speak C/C++, when some ancient game doesn't work on their obscure Arch/Gentoo/Ubuntu distribution and they don't know how to fix it. Boo hoo.
But they'll happily take a paycheck for writing a bunch of shit Go/Ruby/PHP code that runs on Linux 24/7 without downtime - not because of the quality of their code, but due to the reliability of the platform at _that_ particular task. Go figure.
But does the lack of a stable ABI have any (negative) effect on the reliability of the platform?
Like many others, I have Linux servers running over 2000-3000 days uptime. So I'm going to say no, it doesn't, not really.
You must really be behind the times. Arch and Gentoo users wouldn't complain because an old game doesn't run. In fact the exact opposite would happen. It's not implausible for an Arch or Gentoo user to end up compiling their code on a five hour old release of glibc and thereby maximize glibc incompatibility with every other distribution.
That never took off though, containers are easier. Wirh distrobox and other tools this is quite easy, too.
It's definitely not easy, but it's possible: using the `.symver` assembly (pseudo-)directive you can specify the version of the symbol you want to link against.
https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...