> Sometimes it turns out that your code relies on some compiler behavior which has changed.

In practice this can be "undefined behavior" like dangling pointers or data races. Maybe the new version of the compiler happens to reorder a couple of instructions (which it's perfectly within it's rights to do) which turns a "benign" race into a crash or an exploitable security issue. Is it your fault for writing these bugs? Sure. But if you're a big organization, and you know you have bugs like this, is this a reason not to upgrade your compiler? Absolutely. All the real world testing you've done on your current binaries has value, and losing some of that value needs to be weighed against the benefits of upgrading.

> This is incorrect. In practice, for larger code bases, upgrading to a newer version of GCC or Clang is something that must be done purposefully, and you must test. Sometimes it turns out that your code relies on some compiler behavior which has changed. Sometimes newer compilers are stricter than older compilers. There are plenty of real-world cases of these problems!

So if you hit issues, do what you do on every other system which is "installing older Xcode / Visual Studio" ? That would not be an issue at all if the toolchain wasn't vendored as part of the distro, you'd just have something like rustup that allows you to use whatever version of the toolchain your project requires.

> There are a number of features that are specific to the macOS toolchain which make this possible. Take a look at the "-mmacosx-version-min" flag on the macOS compiler. This selectively enables and disables various APIs.

yes ? https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/C_002b_002b-Dialect-Optio...

> We're talking about Linux here. The Windows toolchain is radically different.

what I'm saying is exactly that the Linux desktop world would be in a far better place if Linux followed the Windows / macOS way of vendoring toolchains.

The only thing that is an actual issue on Linux if you want backward compatibility is glibc which does not have an easy way (AFAIK) to say "I want to target this old glibc version". But that's not the issue for what we are talking about which is "getting newer compilers on a given distro" - Red Hat & derivatives manage this without issue with the various devtoolsets for instance.