Maya requires to recompile native plugins for each new version though (unless this has changed recently?). The reason is that the Maya devs made the decision (back in the 90's) to use C++ APIs in DLLs for the plugin interface instead of a C API. Not their best decision in hindsight.
That is (was) a problem if it was built with MSVC. Build it with Gcc, and no. MSVC has lately been obliged to stabilize their ABI a bit, and now plugins are more implicitly stable.
So, not such a bad decision. Building with MSVC used to be a bad decision, less so now.
Are GCC-built plugin DLLs compatible with Maya on Windows? When I dabbled with Maya plugin development up until a few years ago, one had to use a specific MSVC version to compile plugin DLLs.
I believe Clang is able to compile compatibly with MSVC. It would be good customer service for Autodesk to release a Gcc-built Maya, but I would not be surprised if they never do.
