better alternatives fast approaching [LWN.net]

better alternatives fast approaching

Posted Nov 19, 2007 23:24 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: better alternatives fast approaching by elanthis
Parent article: GCC unplugged

Well, yes, the desire for a BSD-licensed compiler above all else *is* the 
only sane reason for anyone to pick up the compiler they did.

If they'd wanted an extensible high-quality free compiler, there are some 
other than GCC which they could have picked up instead which are *far* 
more capable than the ancient thing they chose to go with. (LLVM provides 
most of the pieces needed on its own, but ooh, the license is wrong, 
sheesh.)

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better alternatives fast approaching

Posted Nov 20, 2007 6:29 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

LLVM's licence is basically the BSD licence, so that was clearly not the issue. (Third party components like the GCC front-end are, of course, under different licences. Eventually the front-end will be Clang, so that's not an issue either.)

better alternatives fast approaching

Posted Nov 20, 2007 10:08 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Er, oopsy, mental license collision between similarly-named projects with utterly different
purposes (I was hunting a possible bug in LVM at the time I posted that... LVM, LLVM, what's
the difference, other than the license, the purpose, the design, and in fact everything other
than the name?)