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Red Hat: no desktop products comingRed Hat: no desktop products comingPosted Apr 21, 2008 6:57 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Red Hat: no desktop products coming by mmarq Parent article: Red Hat: no desktop products coming
You mean,... who ever puts in their repositorys win4lin or the free vmware player that anyone can download and install for free... ha! not to mention the commercial version of crossover that always lags several months what is then release to the wine tree... is gonna to be banished from the community.No, simply that free software vendors are unlikely to do it, because a compiler intermediate representation of Adobe Whatever is not free software. GCC has nothing to fear, because GCC will always be better...Unfortunately, GCC is not better at single-machine optimization than many vendor compilers (although it is getting better). So this really would be a temptation. (What's worse is the temptation of hooking up a new frontend, and this has been tried: if GCC had been partitionable as you suggest, we wouldn't have a free Objective C frontend today.) Better GCC can be in GPLv3sigh. GCC has been GPLv3 since that license's release. Do pay attention. Now if GCC is left behind technologically, it will be much more prone to abuse, than if it risks and gets into techs that are clearly not screen free from abuse.If GCC gets left behind technologically, nobody will want to stick their favourite proprietary frontend on it. (Anyway, it's not me you've got to convince; it's RMS. Getting RMS to change his mind when he has reasons to think one thing is hard. Good luck. I'd not even bother trying until your ideas are much more coherently presented.) Get "bold" please.I just don't think optimizers are magic. You seem to think they are. (Again, the magic autoparallelize-everything optimizer does not exist. It's not just that oh look nobody's written one: nobody knows how such a thing might be written.)
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Red Hat: no desktop products coming Posted Apr 21, 2008 16:46 UTC (Mon) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] Really don't understand your objections!... "" No, simply that free software vendors are unlikely to do it, because a compiler intermediate representation of Adobe Whatever is not free software."" Neither is the binary, even packed in RPM format, that Adobe does using GCC, and that distros include in their repositorys. "" Unfortunately, GCC is not better at single-machine optimization than many vendor compilers (although it is getting better). So this really would be a temptation. (What's worse is the temptation of hooking up a new frontend, and this has been tried: if GCC had been partitionable as you suggest, we wouldn't have a free Objective C frontend today.) "" Why not ?... is the Objective C frontend close source ?... Doesn't LLVM include an open source Objective C/C++ frontend, and isn't LLVM partitioned and modular like you say ? "" If GCC gets left behind technologically, nobody will want to stick their favourite proprietary frontend on it."" So its better that way, be left behind so that nobody will be tempted to abuse, is that it ?... my way or no way ? But if that happens wouldn't it be a clear GPL violation ?... Why would anybody risk it, if they can enjoy all the advantages of distributed development and the power that FOSS enjoys, instead of law suits ? Still i believe the biggest problem would be in the backend... But taking an example, isn't AMD CTM/CAL open sourced ?... what is so terrible wrong about cooperation so that the lower parts of that driver could be modular and treated by GCC the same way that Linux treats firmware ?... (only an example because i don't know if CTM/CAL is really open sourced all the way into the clear naked metal) They might do exactly that, putting that lower level as firmware for HW, if they feel that they are being accepted. And who says AMD, can say Intel or Nvidia... "" (Anyway, it's not me you've got to convince; it's RMS. Getting RMS to change his mind when he has reasons to think one thing is hard. Good luck. I'd not even bother trying until your ideas are much more coherently presented.) "" I don't have to convince nobody. Time is a cure for everything. I'm sorry about the coherency anyway. But i think what i'm saying is that, is about time, to GCC to open a new development tree!... yes, like in the time there was a stable and development Linux tree. Certainly is not that easy, nor even magic or something like that... but certainly would prove the power of GCC. The current GCC tree can still be supported for many more years... But what is the point of supporting archaic language front ends, that only 3 guys are using, and one is 80 years old and is forgetting constantly where the return key is ?!... That way would be close to impossible for GCC to evolve, there would be more PITA than anything else, and tech forums would be full of "exposed" technical impediments and hurdles... nobody would bother even to start... the new tree should tackle new problems and new ideas!...
Red Hat: no desktop products coming Posted Apr 21, 2008 19:21 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Neither is the binary, even packed in RPM format, that Adobe does using GCC, and that distros include in their repositorys.Distros that don't ship non-free software don't ship that binary (assuming you mean Flash). (Is it even redistributable? I thought most distros shipped a script that downloaded it from Adobe.) No, but had it been easy to get it to emit something that GCC's backend could have processed, the frontend would have been closed-source. (This is a matter of historical record by this point. If I'm wrong, Joe Buck can tell me I'm full of crap, if he's still reading.)if GCC had been partitionable as you suggest, we wouldn't have a free Objective C frontend today.)Why not ?... is the Objective C frontend close source ? But if that happens wouldn't it be a clear GPL violation ?If GCC emits a stable intermediate representation (as it would have to for distros to usefully ship things in that form), and accepts that representation for further processing, then having some closed-source program emit it probably would not be a GPL violation: at least it would be very hard to prove. This is why GCC doesn't, and won't, emit a stable intermediate representation. (The representation used for link-time optimizations is, as I understand it, by design not stable enough to be usefully emittable by anything but GCC, and definitely not intended as a medium to transport code between machines in.) isn't AMD CTM/CAL open sourced ?... what is so terrible wrong about cooperation so that the lower parts of that driver could be modular and treated by GCC the same way that Linux treats firmware ?This is already doable by implementing a GCC backend that accepts whatever representation the CTM/CAL code generator accepts. It's just like cross-compilation, in fact it is cross-compilation: exactly the same mechanism is used to generate code for the Cell SPUs. But it's not something that magically kicks in: there'd be a different version of a package that had code like this in it, or perhaps a new glibc hwcap and corresponding subdirectories searched by the dynamic linker for shared libraries containing object files in the appropriate form. I don't have to convince nobody. Time is a cure for everything.If you want to get GCC to emit a stable intermediate representation, you have to convince RMS :)
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