2 ms·
Forcing vendors to contribute back upstream is an attempt at making vendor toolchains not exist. If a company makes a new MCU with some exciting new instructio
by mort96 2y ago
Forcing vendors to contribute back upstream is an attempt at making vendor toolchains not exist.
If a company makes a new MCU with some exciting new instruction set, they need to make a compiler available which supports that instruction set and make that compiler available to their customers.
With LLVM as the base, the vendor could make their toolchain proprietary, making it impossible to integrate it back into LLVM, which means the vendor toolchain will exist until the ISA gets wide-spread enough for volunteers to invest the time required to make a separate production-quality LLVM back-end from scratch.
With GCC as the base, the vendor must at least make their GCC fork available to their customers under the GPL. This, in theory, allows the GCC community to "just" integrate the back-end developed by the vendor into GCC rather than starting from scratch.
Now I don't know how effective this is, or how much it happens in practice that the GCC project integrates back-ends from vendor toolchains. But in principle, it's great that vendors have to make their toolchains FOSS because it reduces the need for vendor toolchains.
- dzaima 2y agogcc requires that contributors assign copyright to FSF (or at least "certify the Developer Certificate of Origin")[0], so a fork isn't gonna get upstreamed without the approval of the fork's authors. So that limits the benefit from gcc-forks to individuals keeping the fork alive. [0]: https://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html#legal https://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html#legal
- charcircuit 2y ago>making it impossible to integrate it back into LLVM Code getting open source is not impossible. Companies do it all of the time because it's expensive to rebase.
- mort96 2y agoDude you can't just quote a fraction of a sentence and then argue against that fragment. Read the whole sentence. The part about how "the vendor could make their toolchain proprietary" is kinda important.
- charcircuit 2y agoMy comment was about proprietary software being open sourced.
- mort96 2y agoMy comment was about forcing companies to not make proprietary software.
- LeFantome 2y agoMyth: GPL means more companies contribute to GCC Previous reality: companies write fully proprietary code to avoid GCC Current reality: companies choose Clang over GCC because of the license and then contribute many of their changes back.