GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 1, 2025 18:12 UTC (Wed) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334)
In reply to: GCC front-ends by ibukanov
Parent article: An Algol 68 front end for GCC

There is and there never was anything significantly wrong with GCC. If all these projects [1] managed to work with GCC, it means to me that there is nothing significantly wrong with. The only reason for Apple’s switch to LLVM then (I am not going into battle on merits between LLVM and GCC *now*, that’s a different story) was Steve Job being a control freak, who cannot live without having complete toolset under his control, and perhaps him taking revenge on GCC for forcing him to give up on the Objective-C front end [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#Sup...
[2] https://github.com/JoshCheek/clisp/blob/master/doc/Why-CL... and https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 1, 2025 18:18 UTC (Wed) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

Better URL for the CLISP-related correspondence is https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/doc...

GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 1, 2025 22:00 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> There is and there never was anything significantly wrong with GCC.

Care to remember the state of GCC around 2005? It was a crusty C codebase that still pretended to be buildable by pre-C89 compilers.

The first clang compiler set the bar on error reporting, with colored output that pinpointed the exact position of the errors. GCC later replicated that.

GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 2, 2025 17:12 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> The only reason for Apple’s switch to LLVM then ...

https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/04/11/2012-apples-great...

It's far beyond GCC.

GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 2, 2025 17:21 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

The GPLv2 has a political agenda but it's still just a "pure" software licence. Legal departments are not fans but they've learned to live with it.

The GPL v3 elevated the agenda much higher and reaches beyond software itself. Legal departments generally hate it. Unlike v2, it's been pretty much banned all across Apple products, see reference above.

Whether you agree with the political agenda or not is irrelevant, I'm just sticking to facts here.

GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 3, 2025 2:24 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

> Steve Job being a control freak, who cannot live without having complete toolset under his control

That was never the case and it's pretty easy to prove: to this very day every macOS device carries bash (version 3.2.57), screen (version 4.0.3) and many other tools not controlled by Apple.

It was always about GPLv3. That's why Apple never upgraded past GCC 4.2.

GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 4, 2025 20:25 UTC (Sat) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link] (1 responses)

Doesn't prove anything.

The reason that's the case is because the BSD software MacOS/Darwin are based on never upgraded past GCC 4 because of GPL v3. That's one remove. What it does say is that because LLVM has a vastly more permissive license it's more acceptable to businesses who are in the business of selling software tool sets without giving hints away of what's in their secret sauce. It's business as usual in exploiting unpaid labor whether it's gladly or grudgingly granted without doing more than tossing the open source world a bone from time to time.

GCC front-ends

Posted Jan 4, 2025 23:26 UTC (Sat) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link]

> It's business as usual in exploiting unpaid labor

I would assume that the vast majority of labor that goes into LLVM is paid, much of it by Apple.

The cause of free software is hurt by pretending that free software spontaneously comes into existence from unpaid hobbyists—it means that businesses who would pay for that labor think, it's going to happen on its own whether or not we pay for it, and if we start to pay for it we might prevent it from happening.