Nope! Sometimes you can get away with it.
STL
-----Original Message-----
From: Olaf van der Spek
There's a potential issue with doing that. Binary compatibility between the 2015, 2017, and 2019 toolsets comes with a couple of restrictions: no LTCG (which is a non-issue here), and the final link must be performed by a toolset that's as new as (or newer than) all of the object files and libraries being linked. For example, you can't take VS 2019 16.1 (v142) compiled libraries, and perform a final link with VS 2015 RTM (v140). And in practice, I am aware of at least one build break that can be encountered when attempting this (as we added a vectorized implementation of std::reverse that requires separately compiled support to be dragged in during the final link).
Isn't this (no forward compatibility) detected and enforced by the linker? -- Olaf