Yes, symbol versioning is terrible and unnecessary. (Function has a new contract? Give it a new name. That's how most systems work and it works fine.)

But the problem is deeper: glibc just refuses to provide a TARGET_VERSION facility of some kind. All other major operating systems let you use new headers to target old systems. Even with symbol versions, glibc could too. They just don't want to. They can't sit there any tell everyone version targeting is infeasible when the rest of the planet does it.

glibc's decades of obstinacy about version targeting has distorted the Linux ecosystem, wasted inestimable developer-years, and, ultimately, has destroyed our ability to coordinate intraprocess resources in userspace.

Thanks, libc-alpha.