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> If their only choices are developing their own compiler or basing off of gcc and releasing their work, they'd choose gcc. But that's the exact choice Apple f
by jasode 6y ago
> If their only choices are developing their own compiler or basing off of gcc and releasing their work, they'd choose gcc.
But that's the exact choice Apple faced in 2005 and they did not choose gcc. They paid Chris Lattner and his team to develop an alternative compiler. Excerpt from wikipedia[1]:
>"Finally, GCC is licensed under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3, which requires developers who distribute extensions for, or modified versions of, GCC to make their source code available, whereas LLVM has a BSD-like license which does not have such a requirement.
>Apple chose to develop a new compiler front end from scratch, supporting C, Objective-C and C++. This "clang" project was open-sourced in July 2007."
For some reason, the enthusiastic focus on the benefits of GPL principles seems to ignore the actual game theoretic behavior of actors in the real world to not choose GPL at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Background
- bryanlarsen 6y agoSure, if you have the resources of Apple, you can make other choices. I'd be willing to bet that Apple has spent more than $1B on clang, llvm, tooling, testing, integration, et cetera.
- ptman 6y agoHow much resources did they actually have in 2005?
- stefan_ 6y agoThat's the wrong question. How much resources does someone have who decides to write an entirely new compiler when a working one already exists? Of course the answer then reveals that this was only possible because there was comfy GCC to fall back on all along. They started in 2005, Clang became default in XCode with the 4.2 release in October 2011. Ask yourself if you can sell your manager on 6 years of effort for no functional difference, likely even inferior.