My operating system is a portable operating system so a lot of the non-portable elements are written in the native assembly language. So a lot is written. Well I installed a new version of NASM and it isn't compatible with my code. Things like removing the NASM environment variable really pissed me off. It kept my batch file clean and screwing around the with the include directory code wasn't nice either.
I'm just a little ticked that people remove backward compatibility or add “features” that make you go manually update your code. Also when I upgraded to OpenWatcom 1.6 from Sybase Watcom 11.0c I had to go into every single C source file and add a blank line at the bottom when it ran perfectly on 11.0c without one.
I've had the same problems with GCC. I was happy with my old kernel, but when I transfered it to a newer Linux box with GCC 4, the thing just had a massive heart attack and crashed. My current idea is to implement all platform dependent parts (ie. everything that requires a hack in C.) to assembly, and create everything else in C. Although, I'm still not happy with this...
Well I don't use GCC for a few reasons. One of the reasons is what you mentioned. Also alot of tutorials use it and promote it I want to try to see if I can use another compiler (and assembler).
Alot of technology today is loosing backwards compatibity. I'm not talking about stuff from 1970 but like 1999. Some software won't even run mostly because of companies forcing people to upgrade.
