Stallman's held this view for a very long while. About fifteen years ago, he told someone to memory hole a GCC target to emit JVM bytecode [1] because of the va

Stallman's held this view for a very long while. About fifteen years ago, he told someone to memory hole a GCC target to emit JVM bytecode [1] because of the vague threat that someone could take that, create a theoretical frontend that worked on JVM bytecode, and feed /that/ result into a proprietary compiler. Stallman's fear of the proprietary bogeyman has hamstrung GCC and Free toolchains from being a platform anywhere near as decent as other projects in providing realtime feedback into program design. [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html