I'm only sympathetic to a point. If I distributed C++ code to paying customers who wanted to compile it locally, I'd surely take their needs into account. For a

I'm only sympathetic to a point. If I distributed C++ code to paying customers who wanted to compile it locally, I'd surely take their needs into account. For anything I was releasing as FOSS, deal with it. For instance, my nearby server is running Debian 12/Bookworm with GCC 12. According to https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html, that supports nearly all of C++20. If you can't be bothered to upgrade to your system every few years, I'm not going to make more than 0 effort to cater to your ancient compilers. In Python terms, today I wouldn't break a sweat to manage unsupported Python versions (https://devguide.python.org/versions/ https://devguide.python.org/versions/). If my stuff runs on an old Python 3.8 system, right on! I wouldn't deliberately break it or anything. But if something came along in 3.9 that makes my life more pleasant, I wouldn't hesitate to use it. I also vehemently disagree with your Python characterization. There are any number of common, well-supported ways to easily install arbitrary versions on your system, including pyenv and uv. I have multiple versions installed on the laptop I'm typing this on. I do zero development inside containers: all my work runs directly on the host. And yet, none of them conflict with each other at all.