Im not quite see it clearly (got not so much experience) and maybe some will help me to claryfy this picture
Im mostly talking about windows platform (though I may be courious if on other platforms things looks better)
As far as i know there is no standarisation of lib (static libraries format)
so there we got some static lib-hell (my own name for this) where given static lib may only works with some compiler say VS or say GCC and not across them all (as it should be) [I am speeking on one specyfic system
mostly win32 or win64]
1) is this true?
simple answer: yes.
less simple answer: there is some informal/de-facto standardization of LIB and OBJ file-formats, at least as far as Windows goes (as AR archives and COFF objects, known as OBJ/LIB with MSVC and O/A with GCC). however different compilers have various minor format differences (in terms of structures both within LIB/AR and the COFF objects), making things problematic.
some compilers had also used different formats entirely (for example, a few older compilers had used a 32-bit version of the OMF format and its associated LIB format instead of COFF/AR). there are also differences in the contents of various header-files (ex: what exactly is a "FILE"?), there are differences in terms of parts of the C ABI, and often a very different C++ name mangling scheme and ABI (so C++ object-files are usually incompatible).
the end result is that while sometimes it is possible to force things to link between compilers, usually the result will either not work (at all or at least not correctly) and/or be prone to crashing.
2) do this incompatibility occur between across verisons of compilers
or it only occurs between different compilers (I mean can lib not works if
made with older version of compiller with the newer version of the same
brand compiler or in one compiler it will work for all verions)
it can apply between compiler versions for the same compiler as well.
for example, both MSVC and GCC have changed their ABIs in various ways between compiler versions, so code linked between different compiler versions is prone to not work and/or result in crashes.
this is generally less of an issue for DLLs, as the basic C calling conventions (cdecl and stdcall) are pretty much frozen, and also both MSVC and GCC agree in most areas WRT the basic C ABI, and MS is adverse to changing things which will break existing software.
however, the C++ ABI is compiler specific, and there are a lot of minor edge cases where the C ABI differs between compilers (namely WRT passing/returning structs, the handling of types like "long double" and "__m128", ...), so some care is still needed.
it may also be observed that many/most Windows libraries tend to use a fairly constrained C subset for their APIs (and COM and similar are built on top of the C ABI).
3) are the gcc/vs/intel/what else partially compatible - or in general mostly not compatible
4) is there a way of mending a incompatible lib in some way ?
tnx for the answer (it seem to me tah it may be hard to answer thiss fully but at least partially - i would like to build some wiev on this static lib - hell in windows, how the things look like)
when possible, build things from source all with the same version of the same compiler.