GCC, LLVM, and compiler plugins

GCC, LLVM, and compiler plugins

Posted Jan 30, 2014 2:04 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: GCC, LLVM, and compiler plugins by nix
Parent article: GCC, LLVM, and compiler plugins

Exactly. Furthermore, RMS really doesn't know much about the current state of GCC, so when ESR started screaming about GCC being non-modular and not supporting extensions, RMS started going on about this being a good thing instead of pointing out that it wasn't true. RMS has not been active in GCC development for years. He does not read the gcc list. He reads the Emacs list, so he saw this discussion because it was crossposted. RMS only interacts with the GCC steering committee, and that way the gcc developers can develop code in peace without being constantly drawn in to free software purity discussions. GCC contributors are all over the map as far as the free software vs open source, purity vs "pragmatism" debates are concerned, but they still work together effectively.

Despite his past contributions, in this interaction ESR has basically been acting as a troll (hopefully inadvertently), cross-posting to three development lists (Emacs, gcc, llvm) with highly contentious and uninformed opinions, seemingly designed to get a lot of people yelling at each other. And why? To get attention? To get GCC to make changes that it has already made long ago and Eric didn't know about?

The GCC plugin API isn't stable. But neither is LLVM's, and neither is the Linux kernel module API. There are good reasons for this.

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