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Linux Compiler Upgrade

After we updated compilers for macOS and Windows recently, it may be time for Linux.

To build all our plugins for 64-bit Linux (x86_64) we moved to Ubuntu 18.04 this week.

It turns out that updating to a new version of a compiler is easy. You rebuild everything, check new warnings and handle some error messages for changes in C++ frameworks.

But then we tried the plugin on CentOS 7.9 and this was a disappointment. Tons of missing libraries. Well, looks like the c and c++ libraries in CentOS are a few years older than the one in Ubuntu 18.04. Now either we fix the dependencies or we have to redo with CentOS to have a common base.

It turns out you can track down dependency by dependency and use various compiler options to disable newer features and stay with older C++ version 11 instead of 14 or 17. I'd wish this would be easier, but I had to recompile dozens of times to see what each changes causes. e.g. for a normal standard C++ string, you have nine ways to construct them. But we now have to avoid the newer variants and then it works.

On the end the plugin now loads on CentOS 7.8 and Ubuntu 18.4.
If you use an older version of Linux 64-bit, we may be able to avoid another function for you, but not a dozen!

Our first build of the plugins required glibc version 2.27, glibcxx 3.4.21 and cxxabi 1.3.9 as those are the ones coming with Ubuntu 18.04.
The final builds are down to glibc version 2.17, glibcxx 3.4.18 and cxxabi 1.3, which makes it compatible with CentOS 7.9.
Ubuntu 16 comes with CXXABI 1.3.9 and glibc 2.23, so we expect the plugins load on Ubuntu 16, too.
We also tried a fresh installed CentOS 7.7 and it seems like things work there, too.

Coming soon for pr5. If you like to try before that, please let us know.
23 04 21 - 13:03