The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence [LWN.net]

The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence

Posted Oct 31, 2009 23:44 UTC (Sat) by anton (guest, #25547)
In reply to: The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence by coriordan
Parent article: LLVM 2.6 released

Maybe I am no developer in your eyes, but I would really love to use a fork based on the idea that optimization must preserve behaviour, including non-standard behaviour. Maybe a version based on gcc-2.95 with the new ports added and the bugs fixed. Or a fork based on the current gcc that generates code similar in spirit to what gcc-2.95 produces, by disabling some "optimizations", among other things. I don't know which approach is easier. Of course, it does not have to be a fork, I would be be just as happy with a completely different compiler that has the properties I need.

In my experience the GCC maintainers make the existing extensions less useful by breaking programs that use them; and it seems that some of these programs are even operating systems. BTW, is your focus on operating systems supposed to mean that we should not be using GCC for applications or, e.g., programming language implementations (my domain).

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The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence

Posted Nov 1, 2009 1:43 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

> Maybe I am no developer in your eyes

I never said that, and I'm surprised you could take that meaning from my post. (knowing only your LWN username, how could I judge you?) Either way, it wasn't my intention.

Changes in GCC are often bound to annoy *someone*, but the lack of any current fork or serious discussion of forking implies that, for the vast majority of GCC users, the GCC development team is doing an ok job of steering between progress and compatibility.

(LLVM's reason for being is about licences, not incompatibility discontent - even if they might evoke that as an additional differentiator.)

> is your focus on operating systems supposed to mean that
> we should not be using GCC for applications

No. The distinction is rarely relevant, and I don't think it's relevant here. GCC is for glibc, Apache, python, etc.

The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence

Posted Nov 1, 2009 19:30 UTC (Sun) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

LLVM's reason for being is about licences, not incompatibility discontent - even if they might evoke that as an additional differentiator.

Yes, that would be a good reason to switch to LLVM for those of us who are not content with the attitude towards GNU C shown by the GCC maintainers. Unfortunately the little I have read in the LLVM bug tracker indicates that the LLVM maintainers have an attitude similar to the gcc maintainers at the moment. But competition is good, maybe one of the groups will one day compete for users based on GNU C support instead of just neglecting us because we have no other choice anyway.