BTW, even with a "uniform" Linux environment, I've been finding so many differences in the behavior of libraries that it's driving me nuts. This will be a nice way to get past, for example, inconsistencies in wxWidgets.
I've been thinking about a general purpose experimentation framework for research. Over the last 5 years, I've been re-writing parts of this framework for different projects and wish I had spent some time generalizing and packaging it.
The workflow is:
dataset -> experimental parameters -> code+libraries (this is where the trouble often is) -> result files (plain text, hundreds!) -> analysis (generally in R) -> selectively plotting results