The KDE Project offers some guidance on the difference between source and binary compatibility, and provides a great list of Do’s and Don’ts if you want to maintain binary compatibility for an API.
This document defines binary and source compatibility as:
A library is binary compatible, if a program linked dynamically to a former version of the library continues running with newer versions of the library without the need to recompile.
If a program needs to be recompiled to run with a new version of library but doesn’t require any further modifications, the library is source compatible.
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