Plugging into GCC [LWN.net]

Plugging into GCC

Posted Oct 3, 2008 4:52 UTC (Fri) by wblew (subscriber, #39088)
Parent article: Plugging into GCC

Talk about insecurity. The reason that free software succeeds is because it innovates faster. The proprietary kernel modules exist to drive hardware whose specifications are secret.

However, by their nature, computer languages are *not* secret. They are well specified, or they fail in the marketplace.

I fail to see how the kernel situation is analogous to that of a GCC plugin architecture. I am in agreement with Ian Taylor, if GCC fails to innovate, then it deserves to fail.

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Plugging into GCC

Posted Oct 11, 2008 15:33 UTC (Sat) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link]

Computer languages are not secret (although there have been licensing restrictions on implementing some of them), but optimisation and transformation algorithms in a proprietary plugin can be secret.