> C++: recompile the world when you change ABIs or when the ABI changes (My understanding is that MSVC++ changes the ABI every ~2 years? I could be wrong.) Thi

> C++: recompile the world when you change ABIs or when the ABI changes (My understanding is that MSVC++ changes the ABI every ~2 years? I could be wrong.) This is only half true: every new release, the ABI of the runtime library changes. But the Visual C++ compiler ABI hasn't changed in decades. If you design your own library ABIs so they don't pass std::foobars around, you can link C++ libraries built with VC++6 with ones built with the latest version, and the whole thing is going to work fine - the trick is that multiple versions of the runtime DLLs can coexist in the same process. GCC/libstdc++ hasn't changed its ABI in more than a decade, since release 3.3 or 3.4; they even did incompatible changes to std::string in GCC 5 without breaking ABI: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/02/05/gcc5-and-the-c11-abi/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/02/05/gcc5-and-the-c...