Plugging into GCC

Posted Oct 6, 2008 20:42 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Plugging into GCC by iabervon
Parent article: Plugging into GCC

In practice, GCC has enough weird quirks, even now, that the only way a
fork of GCC is going to take over from GCC itself is if it attracts a lot
of the GCC developers (like egcs did). And if it does that, is it really a
fork?

Plugging into GCC

Posted Oct 6, 2008 23:36 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Well, it would be a fork in that it wouldn't necessarily follow the FSF's intentions for direction. For example, a version that supported plugins written to an API that isn't derived from gcc and is BSD-licensed (and could be supported by icc, etc) could become the de facto current branch on technical merit (if it eliminated a lot of the weird quirks from what a significant class of developers had to deal with), despite the fact that this result is exactly what the FSF wants to avoid.