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GCC's was intentionally designed to be so convoluted to keep anyone from developing out-of-tree code that interfaces with any of it's internal representations,
by blasdel 17y ago
GCC's was intentionally designed to be so convoluted to keep anyone from developing out-of-tree code that interfaces with any of it's internal representations, all for ideological reasons -- Stallman wanted to make sure noone would write any non-GNU features: IDE integration, language frontends, optimizers, target architectures, etc.
You either have to treat it as an executable black box, or fork the whole damn project -- which actually happened back in the day when the FSF's sole paid developer refused all public involvement with RMS's blessing.
- dagw 17y agoAny source on that? I'm not arguing that gcc isn't a convoluted mess and that modifying it in any way is far harder than it perhaps should be. But I've always been under the impression that it just evolved that way due to lack of over all design. Do you have anything to back up that it was actively designed to be convoluted and obfuscated?
- blasdel 17y agoI've heard stories about this for years, there are some choice comments about it by Thomas Lord in this recent thread: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3696 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3696 I can't find it right now, but there was also an old flamewar (can't remember if it was public or just a public recounting) between RMS and Steve Jobs over NeXT's Objective-C frontend.