4 ms·
GCC has been designed specifically NOT to be extended. Richard Stallman reasoned that by exposing an interface to other applications, or allowing other applica
by steve19 11y ago
GCC has been designed specifically NOT to be extended.
Richard Stallman reasoned that by exposing an interface to other applications, or allowing other applications to access or modify intermediate code/trees, closed source proprietary applications could be built around GCC.
He was probably right ... but we all ended up with a worse compiler.
- sprash 11y ago> worse compiler Last time I checked gcc binaries beat Clang performance wise.
- whateveracct 11y agoperformance is far from the only or most important measure of a compiler
- fche 11y ago"GCC has been designed specifically NOT to be extended." Several extension mechanisms have been built out in the last few years, including plugins for intermediate passes of compilation, and a library to operate as a JIT.
- netheril96 11y agoI wonder if that would ever have happened had LLVM not existed.
- tadfisher 11y agoMore than that; we ended up with a crippled Emacs. What could and should be a full-featured IDE built into a self-documenting programmable Lisp-derivative virtual machine is instead a continuation of the "good-enough" conglomeration of regexp-driven hacks that continues to drive new engineers to real and productive solutions produced by the likes of Microsoft. https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/ https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/