I'm not disagreeing that glibc symbol versioning could be better. I raised it because this is probably one of the few valid use cases for containers where they would have a large advantage over a heavyweight VM.

But it's like complaining that you might need a VM or container to compile your software for Win16 or Win32s. Nobody is using those anymore. Nor really old Linux distributions. And if they do, they're not really going to complain about having to use a VM or container.

As C/C++ programmer, the thing I notice is ... the people who complain about this most loudly are the web dev crowd who don't speak C/C++, when some ancient game doesn't work on their obscure Arch/Gentoo/Ubuntu distribution and they don't know how to fix it. Boo hoo.

But they'll happily take a paycheck for writing a bunch of shit Go/Ruby/PHP code that runs on Linux 24/7 without downtime - not because of the quality of their code, but due to the reliability of the platform at _that_ particular task. Go figure.

> But they'll happily take a paycheck for writing a bunch of shit Go/Ruby/PHP code that runs on Linux 24/7 without downtime - not because of the quality of their code, but due to the reliability of the platform at _that_ particular task.

But does the lack of a stable ABI have any (negative) effect on the reliability of the platform?