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 accou

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.