From a bit of research it looks like FreeBSD for example only provides a stable ABI within minor versions and I imagine if you build something for FreeBSD 14 it won’t work on 13.
Stable ABI literally only benefits software where the user doesn’t have the source. Any operating system which assumes you have the source will not prioritize it.
(Edit: actually thinking harder MacOS/iOS is actually much worse on binary compatibility, as for example Intel binaries will stop working entirely due to M-cpu transition - Apple just hits developers with a stick to rebuild their apps)
> Stable ABI literally only benefits software where the user doesn’t have the source.
It also benefits people who don't want to have to do busywork every time the OS updates.
At Yahoo, we'd build on 4.3-4.8, and run on 4.x - 8.x. At WhatsApp, I think I remember mostly building on 8.x and 9.x, for 8.x - 11.x. The only thing that I remember causing major problems was extending the bitmask for CPU pinning; there were a couple updates where old software + old kernel CPU pinning would work, and old software + new kernel CPU pinning failed; eventually upstream made that better as long as you don't run old software on a system with more cores than fit in the bitmask. I'm sure there were a few other issues, but I don't remember them ...
Stable ABI benefits everyone. If I need to recompile a hundred packages with every OS update instead of doing real work then there's something seriously wrong with my OS.
By that point they already hit the developers enough to get them to port to aarch64
(arguably though this could be a special case because it is due to architectural transition)
Apple may require rebuilds at some point for their Mac Store (or whatever they call it), but it's not required from a technical perspective.
The one exception here is CPU architecture changes, and even then, Apple has provided seamless emulation/translation layers that they keep around for quite a few years before dropping support.
