Emacs and clang?

Posted Feb 9, 2014 12:47 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Emacs and clang? by Del-
Parent article: GCC, LLVM, and compiler plugins

The new thing today is that some of the larger software houses are willing to collaborate on BSD code.

That's also not new: X.Org (the X Consortium before it) operated in such a fashion for decades. This model works. Yes, some tangential development is lost and if you compare result of copyleft project and non-copyleft project with similar numbar of contributors then copyleft project is usually more advanced but then non-copyleft projects tend to attract larger number of developers (and, eventually, contributors) which means that in practice results are quite similar.

Emacs and clang?

Posted Feb 9, 2014 13:25 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Hardly tangential, useful extensions like Display Postscript were locked away in proprietary forks of X.

Emacs and clang?

Posted Feb 9, 2014 16:32 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

> X.Org (the X Consortium before it) operated in such a fashion for decades.

Indeed, thanks for reminding me.

> This model works.

Please define what you mean by "this model works". From my end of the universe it hasn't exactly been the unifying experience. Xorg itself was a fork of course, but even ignoring that for a while. How has this played out?

The graphics stack on linux has been a major pain the whole way, and I fail to see how Apple embracing xfree86 helped that even a tiny bit. Today it seems Apple want to go at it alone with its Xquartz. The BSDs of this world seems stuck with xorg, while Android made its own surface flinger, and linux-world is currently being torn apart by wayland/weston and mir.

On the low level bits linux finally had a go at it alone with KMS, leaving BSDs out in the cold. Seems it was just the right cure, and BSD is finally catching up by piggy-backing on the linux graphics stack. Who knows, maybe you will even be able to use something open other than intel graphics on BSD soon.

Is this your idea of successful collaboration? While you are at it, please enlighten us all about the terrific audio stack provided to linux through open sound system. I prefer GPL any day of the week.