KDE’s Binary Compatibility Policy

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.

• http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Binary_Compatibility_Issues_With_C++

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.