Wheel of misfortune

What this operating-systems compatibility question tests

This is a medium-difficulty systems-level question that probes whether you understand the relationship between Python binary wheels, platform-specific ABIs, and runtime dependencies. It's the kind of problem that trips up candidates who rely on high-level abstractions without understanding what happens underneath.

To reason through wheel-compatibility failures, you need to think about the full stack: the compiled C extensions within a wheel, how they link against system libraries, CPU architecture expectations, and glibc version contracts. A wheel that exists on disk but fails to load or run often reveals a mismatch at one of these levels—not a missing file, but a compatibility gap between what the wheel expects and what the system provides.

• Binary compatibility and ABI versioning
• Platform tags and wheel selection
• Dynamic linking and runtime library requirements
• CPU architecture and instruction sets