The problem is that you can't always require people to use the latest bleeding edge version to build your code. Especially the Linux kernel has quite some requi

The problem is that you can't always require people to use the latest bleeding edge version to build your code. Especially the Linux kernel has quite some requirements for backwards compat. And yes, the fact that abi stability isn't really a thing in c++ land is a huge problem too. It has been tried before with beos and it sucked.