3 ms·
Excuse me, but what's so wrong with the existence of a proprietary gcc backend?
by jesuslop 12y ago
Excuse me, but what's so wrong with the existence of a proprietary gcc backend?
- rwmj 12y agoHistory. RMS was worried that "someone" (basically, Intel) would be able to take the gcc frontend and attach the icc (very fast, proprietary) backend to it, thus creating a compiler which could compile the whole GNU stack, producing very fast code. This would entice people to use a non-free compiler. Since then LLVM came along and made the whole point moot, since it has a modular front end which can parse all the gcc extensions.
- yarrel 12y agoUsers are not free to study and modify it to suit their purposes and fix bugs. See here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html