Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft [LWN.net]

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jun 4, 2014 12:28 UTC (Wed) by mlopezibanez (guest, #66088)
In reply to: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft by PaXTeam
Parent article: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

The only way for the GCC plugin API to improve and become useful is for the users of the API to chime in and propose improvements.

There are several functions in that header that could be in GCC and several comments that point out to inefficiencies of the API. Open bugs in GCC bugzilla and/or post patches in gcc-patches.

All the discussion above about licenses and what RMS does or says is a red herring. The only reason why GCC is lagging behind LLVM is lack of developers, and more concretely, a lack of full-time overall leader developers with a clear vision for the whole compiler. The number of contributors to the whole GCC including Ada, Fortran, C/C++, libstdc++, all backends, all middle-end, optimizers, and various tools in the GCC repository is LESS than the number of people that contribute to just Clang.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/gcc

http://www.ohloh.net/p/clang

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jun 4, 2014 14:16 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>All the discussion above about licenses and what RMS does or says is a red herring. The only reason why GCC is lagging behind LLVM is lack of developers, and more concretely, a lack of full-time overall leader developers with a clear vision for the whole compiler.
Why do you think GCC license does not affect the willingness of developers to work on it?

My previous company contributed to LLVM because it's being used in-house for several projects (as a JIT for a certain matching engine). They had zero interest in contributing to GCC because its license wouldn't allow to use this JIT in products shipped to their customers.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jun 4, 2014 16:08 UTC (Wed) by PaXTeam (guest, #24616) [Link]

i do report problems as i encounter them, but the response time could sometimes be better (see #61311 and #61313, not even confirmed after a week).

as for my compat header, see #61176. i think such a compat header doesn't belong into gcc per se. if anything, at most more attention could be paid when changing the exposed API, headers, etc so that plugins have less churn but i'm not really complaining here, it's been quite managable so far (perhaps my only real gripe is that #41757 was ignored at the time).