On Mon, 13 Nov 2023, Gabriel Ivăncescu wrote:
The oldest GCC release series I would remotely consider supporting is GCC 8 which wend end of life mid 2021, though it's really not unreasonable to focus on GCC 11 and later.
Sorry, what? Some distros have 10 year long-term support. Not everything is rolling release, nor should it be, not even close.
I know.
In fact I happen to work for one of the Linux distros with the longest, if not the longest, support cycles.
I mean, compiling or backporting compilers isn't that big of a deal but the main problem with new compilers on old platforms is that you might need new core libraries (libc, libstdc++, etc) because of how GCC works.
We (SUSE in this case, and I believe it similarly holds for Red Hat) do provide newer toolchains for older distros. And we do so in a way that users are fully covered and don't need to build or replace system components on their own.
Having multiple libc side-by-side is difficult, and updating such a core component in a stable distro is way too much to ask.
libc generally isn't affected, though we have been updating it in some cases, and we take care of the default run-time libraries to be suitable for both the older and newer toolschains. (The GNU toolchain puts quite some focus on backwards compatibility of run time components.)
Gerald