Hacker News Reader

When glibc guys changed memcpy implementation which changed its undefined behavior, it broke Flash Player and Linus got pissed off. Afair they reverted the change.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477#c129

IIRC, they later used symbol versioning so that only newly compiled programs get the real memcpy. Older programs get a fake memcpy which simply calls memmove, which is what Flash should have been calling instead of memcpy.

You're basically right; there have been a few incompatible changes (eg aout -> elf, glibc 1 -> 2), but I believe that in all cases there was already a version numbering system in place such that both could be present at the same time.

Additionally, all the distros have update and packaging mechanisms. While you can install off disc, Linux is a lot more .. internet native than Windows.

The Linux world largely ignores binary compatibility. If you want old binaries to work on Linux, the API this is most achievable with is ... win32. As provided by Wine.