A way of using new libs on older systems

[pseregiet]

Hi. I've read your blog post and saw this program. It got me thinking, are we doomed to using old GCC if we want to make portable binaries ? I would think that GCC is getting better and better with each version and it probably generates (even if marginally) better code so I think that sucks. I thought I would try something else.

I've installed Ubuntu LTS 16 and 18 and copied my game to it with the following libs from my current Arch installation:

$ ls stdlibs/ -lh
total 5.4M
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oxi oxi 217K Feb  6 17:55 ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oxi oxi 2.1M Feb  6 17:51 libc.so.6
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oxi oxi  23K Feb  6 17:51 libdl.so.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oxi oxi 1.3M Feb  6 17:51 libm.so.6
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oxi oxi 151K Feb  6 17:51 libpthread.so.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oxi oxi  39K Feb  6 17:56 librt-2.33.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 oxi oxi   15 Feb  6 17:57 librt.so -> ./librt-2.33.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 oxi oxi   10 Feb  6 17:57 librt.so.1 -> ./librt.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 oxi oxi   18 Feb  6 19:02 libSDL2-2.0.so -> ./libSDL2-2.0.so.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 oxi oxi   23 Feb  6 19:01 libSDL2-2.0.so.0 -> ./libSDL2-2.0.so.0.18.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oxi oxi 1.7M Feb  6 19:01 libSDL2-2.0.so.0.18.2

Yes, even the dynamic linker. It is called instead of using the system linker like this

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./stdlibs/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
./stdlibs/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ./game.bin

And it just works(tm). What do you think of this approach ? Do you see anything that could go wrong with this ? I can see one thing already that is a pain with this. It's very hard to connect renderdoc to it since selecting the shell script will cause renderdoc to hook wrong PID and fail. I managed to run renderdoc with such setup only after replacing the system installed linker with my own copy (which was quite funny when for a while ls and cp stopped working when I moved the original file, but I managed :P)