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AFAIK, the fear was that people would implement proprietary plugins for GCC and not upstream their changes and improvements. The classic Embrace, Extend, and Ex
by SubjectToChange 6y ago
AFAIK, the fear was that people would implement proprietary plugins for GCC and not upstream their changes and improvements. The classic Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. Emacs modules were delayed for a long time for the same reason, RMS only approved them on the condition that they export GPL symbols.
LLVM has changed the situation quite a bit though. GCC could make itself easier to hack on but it might be too late.
- qalmakka 6y agoThe irony of it is that no one was really interested in making a new frontend. LLVM was meant to be submitted to GNU, but RMS didn't really show interest in the 00's and instead it rebuffed attempts to disentangle GCC's frontend from the backend, forcing the creation of Clang. It's arguably true that RMS's zealotry actually backfired spectacularly.
- arp242 6y agorms actually missed the offer to donate LLVM to GNU because of the idiosyncratic way he uses email. See: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... I think it's probably for the best; having two competing solutions with different priorities is probably a win for everyone, gcc and clang users alike. gcc has improved much in the last few years in part due to LLVM/clang's pressure.
- arp242 6y ago> LLVM has changed the situation quite a bit though. I've seen people bring this up a few years ago, but there wasn't much change in attitude on rms' end. I don't keep up on the day-to-day of gcc, so perhaps things changed in the last few years(?) I would be surprised if this would happen under rms' tenure though.