Comment by _hudj

This is a long standing question and has nothing to do with Linux or windows. It's a design philosophy.

Yes the win32 abi is very stable. It's also a very inflexible piece of code and it drags it's 20 year old context around with it. If you want to add something to it you are going to work and work hard to ensure that your feature plays nicely with 20 year old code and if what you want to do is ambitious...say refactor it to improve it's performance...you are eternally fighting a large chunk of the codebase implementation that can't be changed.

Linux isn't about that and it never has been, it's about making the best monolithic kernel possible with high level Unix concepts that don't always have to have faithful implementations. The upside here is that you can build large and ambitious features that refactor large parts of how core components work if you like, but you might only compile those features against a somewhat recent glib.

This is a choice. You the developer can link whatever version you want. If you want to build in support for glib then just use features that only existed 10 years ago and you'll get similar compatibility to win32. If not then you are free to explore new features and performance you don't have to implement or track provided you consider it a sensible use cases that someone has to be running a somewhat recent version of glib.

The pros and cons are up for you to decide but it's not as simple as saying that windows is better because it's focus is backwards compatibility. There is an ocean of contexts hidden behind that seemingly magical backwards support...