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Replying to stephenr: > Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing

Replying to stephenr: > Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing so? No, because the freedom of new languages in LLVM would be guarenteed. Again, you can of course have the opinion that this is not important, or not as important as the success of LLVM, but that's your decision.

anon1385 11y ago
>the freedom of new languages in LLVM would be guarenteed. No, the GPL does not work that way. If LLVM was GPL it wouldn't make any difference. LLVM is modular. You can write a front end that generates LLVM IR, then pass that LLVM IR file to LLVM to be compiled. It would be no different then a program that generates bitmaps and then passes them to another program to be jpeg encoded. The licence of the jpeg encoder doesn't affect the licence of your bitmap generating code. This is why GCC is not modular.