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"Fortuitously, Apple eventually discovered a technically brilliant (but sadly non-copylefted) research programming language and compiler system called LLVM." W
by rsync 11y ago
"Fortuitously, Apple eventually discovered a technically brilliant (but sadly non-copylefted) research programming language and compiler system called LLVM."
What does he mean by that ?
Did LLVM already exist in various pieces and apple "discovered" it by putting them together ?
Or is he purposely using the word "discover" to suggest that you can't invent a programming language (since programming is all reducible to math) and that new languages are merely "discovered" ?
- mmastrac 11y ago"Discovered" as in "came across serendipitously" is how I'd parse that.
- shiggerino 11y agoThey discovered that the University of Illinois had been working on a compiler back-end called LLVM, and that being permissively licensed they could use it as a shortcut to making a proprietary compiler without putting in all the work.
- s73v3r 11y agoBy being permissively licensed, it was free from all the garbage and ideological baggage that GCC has, so they could use it in meaningful ways besides being just a compiler. Like using it to do analysis on code in the IDE.
- shiggerino 11y agoThat's because LLVM have those features, not because it has that license. A program designed to do analysis on code in the IDE will still do it even if the program is proprietary, which is the inevitable consequence of promoting permissive licenses.