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It's absolutely a choice. All software can progress while preserving backward compatibility for existing users. It's not always easy, but it's never impossible.


> All software can progress while preserving backward compatibility for existing users

That's an incredibly ignorant claim. Just run "git log" in glibc, it won't take you very long to prove yourself wrong.


glibc, which has had ABI compatibility for decades?


There have been plenty of build breaking changes over the past couple decades, generally they happen for very good reasons and only affect niche usecases.


So existing binaries will keep working?


Not necessarily if you go back far enough to have nss problems :)


Not always without a performance cost which is a no go in projects with very expensive hardware (ahem Cisco).




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