8 ms·

The reason GCC is not a library (2000)

168 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

deterministic 1y ago
And the result is that most new open source languages (and commercial companies) use LLVM instead of GCC as the backend => way more engineering resources are dedicated to LLVM.
- tehjoker 1y ago
  For what it's worth, the leverage did work, just not forever. It was a play with a limited lifetime. It didn't necessarily need to shake out that way, probably if GCC was slightly easier to write for but not too easy people would have invested more. It took a major investment to create a competing product.
  - owlbite 1y ago
    I thought GPLv3 adoption by GCC was what really lit the flames on moving to llvm by commercial entities?
    - tehjoker 1y ago
      You might know this history better than me.
    - fsckboy 1y ago
      you only need to worry about GPLv3 if you are modifying gcc in source and building it and distributing that. Just running gcc does not create a GPLv3 infection. And glibc et al are library licensed so they don't infect what you build either, most especially if you are not modifying its source and rebuilding it.
      - johannes1234321 1y ago
        Still some companies try hard to avoid GPLv3, see Apple, who either provide old GPLv2 licensed software or invest in BSD/MIT replacements.
      - o11c 1y ago
        And what we've seen from e.g. Apple is that "make a private fork and only distribute binaries" is exactly what they wanted the whole time.
      - wmf 1y ago
        you only need to worry about GPLv3 if you are modifying gcc in source and building it and distributing that. That's the context here. If you build a new compiler based on GCC, GPL applies to you. If you build a new compiler based on LLVM it doesn't.
        fsckboy 1y ago
        the context here doesn't actually specify whether we are talking about companies using llvm sources to create proprietary compilers (or maybe integrated with a proprietary IDE) or using llvm to quickly bootstrap and craft a compiler for a new processor, new language, etc., where they will distribute the source to the compiler anyway but such a compiler or IDE would not GPLv3 infect it's users' target sources and binaries.
        int_19h 1y ago
        The main problem with GPLv3 specifically from the perspective of various commercial vendors is the patent clause.
  - kcexn 1y ago
    GCC has come a long way in terms of features and complexity since the 90's/00's when Stallman made these decisions. Today, building a compiler from scratch would be a huge undertaking, and would be prohibitively expensive for most organizations regardless of licensing. If the requirement was still just to implement a "simple" C89 compliant compiler, and I was worried about software freedom. The GPL is probably still a good bet.
- riffraff 1y ago
  I'm not sure that's the only reason. In recent years a lot of projects have chosen to avoid the (l)GPL and use more permissive licences to try and reach a larger audience that might have been spooked by free software. This gave LLM a leg up too.
  - pie_flavor 1y ago
    They can do this because they have a choice. Apple cleaned itself of the GPL once it could, after a long stint where it couldn't. Had GCC been the library backend standard instead of LLVM, the world would have a lot more GPL in its compilers.
    - eqvinox 1y ago
      And yet, LLVM is thriving, and not desolately crying for proprietary commercial improvements to be fed back by their creators. It's an odd balance, sometimes it works out, this seems to be such a case.
    - motorest 1y ago
      > They can do this because they have a choice. Apple cleaned itself of the GPL once it could, after a long stint where it couldn't. Had GCC been the library backend standard instead of LLVM, the world would have a lot more GPL in its compilers. I don't think this is a valid assumption. If the root cause was a refusal to adopt GPL software, I think it's rather obvious that in a universe where LLVM doesn't exist, companies such as Apple will still diverte their resources to non-LLVM software. Apple is also not resource-constrained or a stranger to develop compilers and their programming languages. Does anyone believe that GCC is the only conceivable way of developing a compiler? There's a lot of specious reasoning involved in this idea that LLVM is the sole reason some companies don't adopt GCC. The truth of the matter is that licenses do matter, and if a license is compatible with their goals then companies can and will contribute (LLVM) whereas if it isn't (GCC) companies will avoid even looking at it.
  - oblio 1y ago
    Let's be real here. A lot of this is driven by FAANG or FAANG wannabes, companies at a scale where they can basically reproduce huge chunk of OSS infrastructure. They also put out a lot of Open Source with they don't want to license as GPL due to a general fear of GPL contamination. Most of this is huge corporation driven.
- menaerus 1y ago
  In retrospective, I think this came out for the better in case of LLVM, and probably for GCC too. After all, both compilers emit ~equally optimized code today.
  - eptcyka 1y ago
    More languages choose LLVM as their primary backend, like Rust, Crystal, Julia.
- nutjob2 1y ago
  There is also the case of the more liberally licensed SRC Modula-3 compiler (front end) which worked around the GPL by running GCC as a separate process and feeding it IR files. Less efficient, but effective. It's always an option if you're willing to put up with the awkwardness and inefficiency. GPL has more in common with DRM than you would think.
enriquto 1y ago
Oh, this is one of my favorite (and sad!) dramas in free software. Five years later the main llvm developer proposed [0] to integrate it into gcc. Unfortunately, this critical message was missed by a mail mishap on Stallman's part; and he publicly regretted both his errors (missing the message and not accepting the offer), ten years later [1]. The drama was discussed in realtime here in HN [2]. [0] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028738
- LPisGood 1y ago
  I feel like this is a sort of evidence that even for the most serious of engineers email lists are not an ideal way to communicate.
  - enriquto 1y ago
    Still, we are discussing it almost 30 years after it happened. What alternative messaging system offers such openness and stability? I don't see anything other than publicly archived mailing lists.
    - riffraff 1y ago
      I think Mozilla has a bugzilla instance that's been around almost as much, e.g. this is 26 years old https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=Closed%20Bug%2035839%20Opened%2025%20years%20ago%20Closed%2023%20years%20ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=C...
      - db48x 1y ago
        Bugzilla is good for some things, but terrible for discussions, questions, offers, advice, etc, etc.
    - 1y ago
nilamo 1y ago
Strange philosophy, imo. Feels very much like saying "My version of free is best, and I must force you to implement it yourself".
- nextaccountic 1y ago
  Stallman's version of free is free to the end user. He cares more about whether the end user will have access to the source code and means to modify their software to remove any anti-feature, and less about whatever freedoms the developers of said software would want (such as, the freedom to close the source and distribute only binaries) Ultimately Stallman was against a kind of digital feudalism, where whoever developed software had power over those that didn't
  - positron26 1y ago
    > free to the end user To which none can answer how it creates freedom without mass adoption to actually get the software into end users' hands. The great contradiction in FSF philosophy is to create highly pure software within a monastery of programmer-users while simultaneously insisting to focus on end-user freedoms without reconciling programmer incentives to build what these end users need.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      And yet despite your theory it appeared to work quite well in practice. If reality disproves your theory, it's not reality that's wrong.
      - positron26 1y ago
        Open source works. FSF tactics for producing and promoting free/libre do not. Let's not give the FSF credit for what open source does.
        lelanthran 1y ago
hackerbrother 1y ago
Freedom through obscurutiy
bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
Stallman is such a deep thinker. I think he doesnt get nearly as much credit as he deserves.
- duckerude 1y ago
  I don't think this shows deep thought on his part. By Stallman's own telling a free Objective-C frontend was an unexpected outcome. Until it came up in practice he thought a proprietary compiler frontend would be legal (https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp/blob/dd313099db351c90431c1c90332192edce2bb5c9/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL#L366 https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp/blob/dd313099db351c90431c...). So his stance in this email is a reaction to specific incidents, not careful forethought. And the harms of permissive licensing for compiler frontends seem pretty underwhelming. After Apple moved to LLVM it largely kept releasing free compiler frontends. (But maybe I'd think differently if I e.g. understood GNAT's licensing better.)
awaymazdacx5 1y ago
What about peripheral packages for the GCC library? The compiler specifies objective C in GPL for front end architecture.
rurban 1y ago
Besides the LLVM drama, we do have a libgcc for jit library now, which uses just the backend to create a better jit than llvm. More speed and more backends. Did Dave Malcolm contact RMS privately as he said then? I only know about https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-patches/2013-10/msg00228.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-patches/2013-10/msg00228.h... Why did RMS back down then? He still opposes a ffi for emacs, even if behind the scenes there is now a ffi in emacs for gtk.
- stabbles 1y ago
  Is libgccjit used a lot? I think I have only seen it in emacs.
  - rurban 1y ago
    And poke. But emacs is big enough. Cannot get much bigger
sylware 1y ago
This does not really matter, there is really worse. This real apocalypse did happen upon making gcc a c++ project. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes in open software ever. There were rumors which do match the timing: the media labs (and gcc steering "committee") at MIT being fiddled auround by B. Gates via Epstein (yes, the one you are thinking about). Are those rumors true? Well, there is "something", but "actually what"? All we know is RMS had to "disappear" for a little while... and that was not for health issues and probably to avoid being splash by the MIT 'media labs' affair. Open source is not enough anymore, we (all of us) need _lean_ open source, which excludes de facto ultra-complex syntax computer languages (c++ and similar), that to foster real-life alternatives in the SDK space. gcc is now not much better that closed source software.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  LLVM is a C++ project from the start and has 5x more contributions than GCC, we should have moved on from C long time ago.
  - sylware 1y ago
    Indeed, LLVM was bad right from the start...
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Apparently the world of compiler vendors and university researchers don't agree with. LLVM is the only open source project that rivals with the Linux kernel in the amount of contributions. https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Code-Activity-2024 https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Code-Activity-2024
      - sylware 1y ago
        academics does not mean honest and good anymore.
        1y ago

168 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

And the result is that most new open source languages (and commercial companies) use LLVM instead of GCC as the backend => way more engineering resources are dedicated to LLVM.

tehjoker 1y ago
For what it's worth, the leverage did work, just not forever. It was a play with a limited lifetime. It didn't necessarily need to shake out that way, probably if GCC was slightly easier to write for but not too easy people would have invested more. It took a major investment to create a competing product.
- owlbite 1y ago
  I thought GPLv3 adoption by GCC was what really lit the flames on moving to llvm by commercial entities?
  - tehjoker 1y ago
    You might know this history better than me.
  - fsckboy 1y ago
    you only need to worry about GPLv3 if you are modifying gcc in source and building it and distributing that. Just running gcc does not create a GPLv3 infection. And glibc et al are library licensed so they don't infect what you build either, most especially if you are not modifying its source and rebuilding it.
    - johannes1234321 1y ago
      Still some companies try hard to avoid GPLv3, see Apple, who either provide old GPLv2 licensed software or invest in BSD/MIT replacements.
    - o11c 1y ago
      And what we've seen from e.g. Apple is that "make a private fork and only distribute binaries" is exactly what they wanted the whole time.
    - wmf 1y ago
      you only need to worry about GPLv3 if you are modifying gcc in source and building it and distributing that. That's the context here. If you build a new compiler based on GCC, GPL applies to you. If you build a new compiler based on LLVM it doesn't.
      - fsckboy 1y ago
        the context here doesn't actually specify whether we are talking about companies using llvm sources to create proprietary compilers (or maybe integrated with a proprietary IDE) or using llvm to quickly bootstrap and craft a compiler for a new processor, new language, etc., where they will distribute the source to the compiler anyway but such a compiler or IDE would not GPLv3 infect it's users' target sources and binaries.
        int_19h 1y ago
        The main problem with GPLv3 specifically from the perspective of various commercial vendors is the patent clause.
- kcexn 1y ago
  GCC has come a long way in terms of features and complexity since the 90's/00's when Stallman made these decisions. Today, building a compiler from scratch would be a huge undertaking, and would be prohibitively expensive for most organizations regardless of licensing. If the requirement was still just to implement a "simple" C89 compliant compiler, and I was worried about software freedom. The GPL is probably still a good bet.
riffraff 1y ago
I'm not sure that's the only reason. In recent years a lot of projects have chosen to avoid the (l)GPL and use more permissive licences to try and reach a larger audience that might have been spooked by free software. This gave LLM a leg up too.
- pie_flavor 1y ago
  They can do this because they have a choice. Apple cleaned itself of the GPL once it could, after a long stint where it couldn't. Had GCC been the library backend standard instead of LLVM, the world would have a lot more GPL in its compilers.
  - eqvinox 1y ago
    And yet, LLVM is thriving, and not desolately crying for proprietary commercial improvements to be fed back by their creators. It's an odd balance, sometimes it works out, this seems to be such a case.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > They can do this because they have a choice. Apple cleaned itself of the GPL once it could, after a long stint where it couldn't. Had GCC been the library backend standard instead of LLVM, the world would have a lot more GPL in its compilers. I don't think this is a valid assumption. If the root cause was a refusal to adopt GPL software, I think it's rather obvious that in a universe where LLVM doesn't exist, companies such as Apple will still diverte their resources to non-LLVM software. Apple is also not resource-constrained or a stranger to develop compilers and their programming languages. Does anyone believe that GCC is the only conceivable way of developing a compiler? There's a lot of specious reasoning involved in this idea that LLVM is the sole reason some companies don't adopt GCC. The truth of the matter is that licenses do matter, and if a license is compatible with their goals then companies can and will contribute (LLVM) whereas if it isn't (GCC) companies will avoid even looking at it.
- oblio 1y ago
  Let's be real here. A lot of this is driven by FAANG or FAANG wannabes, companies at a scale where they can basically reproduce huge chunk of OSS infrastructure. They also put out a lot of Open Source with they don't want to license as GPL due to a general fear of GPL contamination. Most of this is huge corporation driven.
menaerus 1y ago
In retrospective, I think this came out for the better in case of LLVM, and probably for GCC too. After all, both compilers emit ~equally optimized code today.
- eptcyka 1y ago
  More languages choose LLVM as their primary backend, like Rust, Crystal, Julia.
nutjob2 1y ago
There is also the case of the more liberally licensed SRC Modula-3 compiler (front end) which worked around the GPL by running GCC as a separate process and feeding it IR files. Less efficient, but effective. It's always an option if you're willing to put up with the awkwardness and inefficiency. GPL has more in common with DRM than you would think.

enriquto 1y ago

Oh, this is one of my favorite (and sad!) dramas in free software. Five years later the main llvm developer proposed [0] to integrate it into gcc. Unfortunately, this critical message was missed by a mail mishap on Stallman's part; and he publicly regretted both his errors (missing the message and not accepting the offer), ten years later [1]. The drama was discussed in realtime here in HN [2]. [0] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028738

LPisGood 1y ago
I feel like this is a sort of evidence that even for the most serious of engineers email lists are not an ideal way to communicate.
- enriquto 1y ago
  Still, we are discussing it almost 30 years after it happened. What alternative messaging system offers such openness and stability? I don't see anything other than publicly archived mailing lists.
  - riffraff 1y ago
    I think Mozilla has a bugzilla instance that's been around almost as much, e.g. this is 26 years old https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=Closed%20Bug%2035839%20Opened%2025%20years%20ago%20Closed%2023%20years%20ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=C...
    - db48x 1y ago
      Bugzilla is good for some things, but terrible for discussions, questions, offers, advice, etc, etc.
  - 1y ago

nilamo 1y ago

Strange philosophy, imo. Feels very much like saying "My version of free is best, and I must force you to implement it yourself".

nextaccountic 1y ago
Stallman's version of free is free to the end user. He cares more about whether the end user will have access to the source code and means to modify their software to remove any anti-feature, and less about whatever freedoms the developers of said software would want (such as, the freedom to close the source and distribute only binaries) Ultimately Stallman was against a kind of digital feudalism, where whoever developed software had power over those that didn't
- positron26 1y ago
  > free to the end user To which none can answer how it creates freedom without mass adoption to actually get the software into end users' hands. The great contradiction in FSF philosophy is to create highly pure software within a monastery of programmer-users while simultaneously insisting to focus on end-user freedoms without reconciling programmer incentives to build what these end users need.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    And yet despite your theory it appeared to work quite well in practice. If reality disproves your theory, it's not reality that's wrong.
    - positron26 1y ago
      Open source works. FSF tactics for producing and promoting free/libre do not. Let's not give the FSF credit for what open source does.
      - lelanthran 1y ago

hackerbrother 1y ago

Freedom through obscurutiy

bfkwlfkjf 1y ago

Stallman is such a deep thinker. I think he doesnt get nearly as much credit as he deserves.

duckerude 1y ago
I don't think this shows deep thought on his part. By Stallman's own telling a free Objective-C frontend was an unexpected outcome. Until it came up in practice he thought a proprietary compiler frontend would be legal (https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp/blob/dd313099db351c90431c1c90332192edce2bb5c9/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL#L366 https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp/blob/dd313099db351c90431c...). So his stance in this email is a reaction to specific incidents, not careful forethought. And the harms of permissive licensing for compiler frontends seem pretty underwhelming. After Apple moved to LLVM it largely kept releasing free compiler frontends. (But maybe I'd think differently if I e.g. understood GNAT's licensing better.)

awaymazdacx5 1y ago

What about peripheral packages for the GCC library? The compiler specifies objective C in GPL for front end architecture.

rurban 1y ago

Besides the LLVM drama, we do have a libgcc for jit library now, which uses just the backend to create a better jit than llvm. More speed and more backends. Did Dave Malcolm contact RMS privately as he said then? I only know about https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-patches/2013-10/msg00228.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-patches/2013-10/msg00228.h... Why did RMS back down then? He still opposes a ffi for emacs, even if behind the scenes there is now a ffi in emacs for gtk.

stabbles 1y ago
Is libgccjit used a lot? I think I have only seen it in emacs.
- rurban 1y ago
  And poke. But emacs is big enough. Cannot get much bigger

sylware 1y ago

This does not really matter, there is really worse. This real apocalypse did happen upon making gcc a c++ project. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes in open software ever. There were rumors which do match the timing: the media labs (and gcc steering "committee") at MIT being fiddled auround by B. Gates via Epstein (yes, the one you are thinking about). Are those rumors true? Well, there is "something", but "actually what"? All we know is RMS had to "disappear" for a little while... and that was not for health issues and probably to avoid being splash by the MIT 'media labs' affair. Open source is not enough anymore, we (all of us) need _lean_ open source, which excludes de facto ultra-complex syntax computer languages (c++ and similar), that to foster real-life alternatives in the SDK space. gcc is now not much better that closed source software.

pjmlp 1y ago
LLVM is a C++ project from the start and has 5x more contributions than GCC, we should have moved on from C long time ago.
- sylware 1y ago
  Indeed, LLVM was bad right from the start...
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Apparently the world of compiler vendors and university researchers don't agree with. LLVM is the only open source project that rivals with the Linux kernel in the amount of contributions. https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Code-Activity-2024 https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Code-Activity-2024
    - sylware 1y ago
      academics does not mean honest and good anymore.
      - 1y ago