Comment by torginus
10 days ago
Note that this also doesn't work on Linux - your system's package manager probably has no idea how to install and handle having multiple versions of packages and headers.
That's why docker build environments are a thing - even on Windows.
Build scripts are complex, and even though I'm pretty sure VS offers pretty good support for having multiple SDK versions at the same time (that I've used), it only takes a single script that wasn't written with versioning in mind, to break the whole build.
> Note that this also doesn't work on Linux - your system's package manager probably has no idea how to install and handle having multiple versions of packages and headers.
But this isn’t true. Many distros package major versions of GCC/LLVM as separate packages, so you install and use more than one version in parallel, no Docker/etc required
It can indeed be true for some things-such as the C library-but often not for the compilers
The closest thing I saw to this was some vendors shipping their SDKs with half the desktop userland (in a similar 'blob' fashion the post complains about), with shell scripts setting up paths so that their libs and tools are found before system ones.
To give a concrete example of what I was talking about, RHEL has “gcc-toolset” for installing multiple GCC versions in parallel:
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/04/16/gcc-and-gc...
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Until the day there is that symlink, or environment variable with the incorrect value.
Guix and Nix can do that. They were built from the ground up to be able to have multiple, simultaneous versions of everything installed in separate store, and you can request on a per shell basis what you want in your environment.