4 ms·

Interesting. It seems Google is moving away from anything gpl/gnu lately (fuchsia, etc...)

by quickben 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago
Yep, GCC is no longer supported on Android.
wongmjane 9y ago
I think it is mainly due to their concerns over the Tivoization clause which is added to GPLv3
- chocolatebunny 9y ago
  That's true for any developer of embedded software. Any one who makes hardware of any kind will avoid trying to put any GPLv3 licensed code on their hardware.
- DannyBee 9y ago
  Again, no, we didn't care. First: We were already publishing all our GCC changes, as we did all our work upstream (we worked on a staging branch in the gcc repo, and changes were moved to trunk as fast as possible) Plenty of other companies used our branch and we were happy with it. We do all our work upstream for clang/llvm as well, and pull compiler releases when upstream is green according to our internal testing. (Pretty much the only cherry picks are a small number of reverts sometimes) Second, literally nobody has ever come and expressed a concern about using GCC to me. I've had to explain the runtime and libstdc++ exceptions to people, but that was the other way around -- They weren't worrying, and I needed to make sure they worried and shipped source when they ship it as a .so.
slrz 9y ago
I doubt this is very relevant in the case of Chrome compilers. It's more about the huge investment/expertise in Clang- or LLVM-based dynamic analysis and development tooling. It's just the better platform for writing these things. Heck, this is what is was built for in the first place. GCC is a solid, but also a very traditional compiler.
- saurik 9y ago
  > Heck, this is what is was built for in the first place. LLVM was supposed to be a virtual machine environment (hence the name); I remember when it came out and I was in college doing program language research. It entirely dropped that history and got twisted into a compiler platform much later. And clang only came into existence because the developers of g c (in particular, Richard Stallman) did not want to work with Apple on maintaining LLVM as a gdc backend (which was a stupid stupid decision: Apple said they would be willing to give the copyright of LLVM to the FSF, which would have kept all compiler tech under GPL), which was all well after Apple had been switching to LLVM for their compiler stack (in order to obtain weird optimizations).
snvzz 9y ago
>(fuchsia, etc...) Of all the reasons, I doubt they're working on fuchsia as a GPL license workaround.
merlish 9y ago
To add (baseless) speculation to the mix, I think it's more NIH than GPLv3 concerns...
DannyBee 9y ago
So, as the person responsible for deciding to make just about all of the compiler switches happen (and i used to run opensource licensing for Google), this is just coincidence[1]. In this case, we just felt clang/llvm was a better architecture to build on at this point. These are also many-year projects. I was a GCC/gdb/etc maintainer for many years, so i've got nothing against GPL software. [1] Well, part of it is that by numbers, most newer open source projects are not GPL. The percent of GPL'd new projects before, say, 2010 and after 2010 is very different. I haven't gone far back to see when that starts, but the percentages are quite significant. It used to be 40-50% of new projects, and now it's like 10-20, maybe.
- quickben 9y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to shed some light on this. I understand your point about a multi-year project. I actually worked on a debugger before (to support a proprietary complier) so I know decisions in that area are far from random. As a note for myself, I should check out llvm in greater detail.

Interesting. It seems Google is moving away from anything gpl/gnu lately (fuchsia, etc...)

pjmlp 9y ago

Yep, GCC is no longer supported on Android.

wongmjane 9y ago

I think it is mainly due to their concerns over the Tivoization clause which is added to GPLv3

chocolatebunny 9y ago
That's true for any developer of embedded software. Any one who makes hardware of any kind will avoid trying to put any GPLv3 licensed code on their hardware.
DannyBee 9y ago
Again, no, we didn't care. First: We were already publishing all our GCC changes, as we did all our work upstream (we worked on a staging branch in the gcc repo, and changes were moved to trunk as fast as possible) Plenty of other companies used our branch and we were happy with it. We do all our work upstream for clang/llvm as well, and pull compiler releases when upstream is green according to our internal testing. (Pretty much the only cherry picks are a small number of reverts sometimes) Second, literally nobody has ever come and expressed a concern about using GCC to me. I've had to explain the runtime and libstdc++ exceptions to people, but that was the other way around -- They weren't worrying, and I needed to make sure they worried and shipped source when they ship it as a .so.

slrz 9y ago

I doubt this is very relevant in the case of Chrome compilers. It's more about the huge investment/expertise in Clang- or LLVM-based dynamic analysis and development tooling. It's just the better platform for writing these things. Heck, this is what is was built for in the first place. GCC is a solid, but also a very traditional compiler.

saurik 9y ago
> Heck, this is what is was built for in the first place. LLVM was supposed to be a virtual machine environment (hence the name); I remember when it came out and I was in college doing program language research. It entirely dropped that history and got twisted into a compiler platform much later. And clang only came into existence because the developers of g c (in particular, Richard Stallman) did not want to work with Apple on maintaining LLVM as a gdc backend (which was a stupid stupid decision: Apple said they would be willing to give the copyright of LLVM to the FSF, which would have kept all compiler tech under GPL), which was all well after Apple had been switching to LLVM for their compiler stack (in order to obtain weird optimizations).

snvzz 9y ago

>(fuchsia, etc...) Of all the reasons, I doubt they're working on fuchsia as a GPL license workaround.

merlish 9y ago

To add (baseless) speculation to the mix, I think it's more NIH than GPLv3 concerns...

DannyBee 9y ago

So, as the person responsible for deciding to make just about all of the compiler switches happen (and i used to run opensource licensing for Google), this is just coincidence[1]. In this case, we just felt clang/llvm was a better architecture to build on at this point. These are also many-year projects. I was a GCC/gdb/etc maintainer for many years, so i've got nothing against GPL software. [1] Well, part of it is that by numbers, most newer open source projects are not GPL. The percent of GPL'd new projects before, say, 2010 and after 2010 is very different. I haven't gone far back to see when that starts, but the percentages are quite significant. It used to be 40-50% of new projects, and now it's like 10-20, maybe.

quickben 9y ago
Thank you for taking the time to shed some light on this. I understand your point about a multi-year project. I actually worked on a debugger before (to support a proprietary complier) so I know decisions in that area are far from random. As a note for myself, I should check out llvm in greater detail.