Introducing the notion of a minimum header version has multiple benefits. It allows us to merge a bunch of ABI macros into a single one. This makes configuring the library significantly easier, since, for a stable ABI, you only need to know which version you started distributing the library with, instead of checking which ABI flags have been introduced at what point. For platforms which have a moving window of the minimum version a program has been compiled against, this also makes it simple to remove symbols from the dylib when they can't be used by any program anymore.
124 KiB
124 KiB