Comment by renehsz
24 days ago
> maybe today you can still build a win10 binary with a win11 toolchain, but you cannot build a win98 binary with it for sure.
In my experience, that's not quite accurate. I'm working on a GUI program that targets Windows NT 4.0, built using a Win11 toolchain. With a few tweaks here and there, it works flawlessly. Microsoft goes to great lengths to keep system DLLs and the CRT forward- and backward-compatible. It's even possible to get libc++ working: https://building.enlyze.com/posts/targeting-25-years-of-wind...
What does "a Win11 toolchain" mean here? In the article you link, the guy is filling missing functions, rewriting the runtime, and overall doing even more work than what I need to do to build binaries on a Linux system from 2026 that would work on a Linux from the 90s : a simple chroot. Even building gcc is a walk in the park compared to reimplementing OS threading functions...