I'm on a slightly older version than 10.12. I'm out of this limited support range. The problem is that as soon Apple cuts off older systems by heavy force all of the Mac developers running in circles like lemmings and cut off their projects from the older versions too: feeding right into Apple's policy to deprecate older systems for their own greed.
For comparison… I have zero problems bootstrapping a recent gcc with all bells and whistles on my setup. I probably even could bootstrap it still on my even older G4 Mac with 10.6.
But so called "modern" language compilers like Rust of Go… no luck. There's a slight hope for the gcc rust support someday, I guess.
> as soon Apple cuts off older systems by heavy force all of the Mac developers running in circles like lemmings
You can make this point without showing contempt for people who are trying their best to support their users. It’s very hard to support Apple platforms if the OS isn’t supported or if XCode drops support for it. There are no workarounds if no one offers CI hardware running that OS/arch.
Nor is there much incentive to try. Only a tiny minority are on the same OS as you, and with good reason. It was released 9 years ago and marked End-of-Life 6 years ago.
It costs time and money to support users like you, and open source volunteer driven projects sometimes don’t have that. Rust and other projects have added support for smaller platforms if passionate volunteers drive it forward. You’re welcome to do that, but it sounds like you’re happy with GCC.
In my experience the small projects with actual volunteers have no trouble helping out here. They are happy to accept a patch too, f.ex.
It's the big "open source" projects with company backing (or other larger organisational structures) behind them which supposedly have a lot of "volunteers" (probably some paid folks, and IMHO lots of people that just slave away for free for someone else's gain) that often have trouble keeping 3 or 4 code lines for backwards compatibility.
I wrote hundreds of GitHub issues, send in patches too, etc., and most discrimination you get is from the bigger projects (not saying this is the case for Rust here; I simply haven't managed to get Rust going at all, so I couldn't even report an issue or send in a patch to fix something.) I do not use the term "discrimination" lightly either. Not everyone can afford to buy new hardware when Apple decides to abandon specific machines, often w/o true technical need (see OpenCore which proves this point). So this is essentially a discrimination of a poor minority.
For "infrastructure" projects like Rust and Go where a lot of other projects depend upon I generally would prefer a more conservative approach here, which doesn't seem to happen for some reason or another… "for the sake of 'progress'", I guess.
For comparison… I have zero problems bootstrapping a recent gcc with all bells and whistles on my setup. I probably even could bootstrap it still on my even older G4 Mac with 10.6.
But so called "modern" language compilers like Rust of Go… no luck. There's a slight hope for the gcc rust support someday, I guess.