> compiles against its own version of the C/C++ standard library The C++ library yes. However IIRC Windows now ships a conforming somehow-modern C standard li

> compiles against its own version of the C/C++ standard library The C++ library yes. However IIRC Windows now ships a conforming somehow-modern C standard library (ucrt) and modern MSVCs link to it. It is probably also included in current redistributables for the still supported (by MSVC) old versions of Windows that did not have it. Also, the forever binary incompatible C++ standard lib had its limit regardless of the platform (more because of 3rd party binary libs) and MS has switched to a backward binary compatible C++ redistributable for a few years now (they may rebreak in the future). So on some points (but not all, and it is likely to never be all) the situation is converging. > to avoid the classic nonsense that every Linux user sees when they build a binary and bring it to an older OS The thing with building a binary-only program for "Linux" is that "Linux" is not a single OS, and you don't really have cross-distro binary compat except by luck, and for the different versions of a same distro they concentrate on rebuilding everything from source, plus you have a unified namespace of symbols in ELFs so you would not be able to load 2 different C++ libs anyway. This brings drawbacks, but also advantages (for ex you can use C++ libraries of the platform, with an unconstrained C++ API) So the end result is kind of what you say, except if you want things to work really well you should probably even do: * a specific native package for each distro (maybe × version) * try to dynamically link to the fewest possible libs of the platform, ideally only glibc (and yes, an old enough one), maybe also libstdc++ if you want to support plugins, and maybe others if they come with a compatibility policy (so on a case by case basis) * or target something else than a native distro (ex: flatpak, appimage), although it is sometimes kind of equivalent to yet other distros -- anyway at this point it starts to resemble to how you would distribute a binary for Windows -- so with those possibilities existing it is just that under a GNU/Linux distro you also have the classic/more-integrated ones. Anyway, Chrome manages to do binary packages for various version of Debian, and probably other distros; likewise for VS Code and Virtual Box. And building for multiple targets is arguably less a pain today than 10 years ago.