Comment by skissane
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.
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...
this seems to be the same approach I saw with other SDKs (for example Qt), which I wrote about in my previous post - the official versions ship half the userland dependencies in a directory under /opt/
and use some scripts (chroot or LD_LIBRARY_PATH maybe, not an expert) to create a separate environment for the given toolset.
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Until the day there is that symlink, or environment variable with the incorrect value.