Eric S. Raymond Calls Out The FSF/GCC On Clang

[ciplogic]

Are politics news? Even if Eric S. Raymond writes it doesn't make always a problem of Clang or GCC. Given this still should be read in context.
Ian Taylor, an important GCC developer writes:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00181.html

I'm sympathetic to our comments regarding GCC vs. clang. But I'm not
sure I grasp your proposed solution. GCC does support plugins, and
has supported them for a few releases now.

GCC plugins have what turns out to be a significant defect: the plugin
interface simply exposes GCC internals, and as such is not stable
across releases. I pushed for plugins in GCC, and I thought this
unstable interface would be OK, but I was wrong. For general plugins
to be useful, we need a more stable interface.

But that is a technical issue, not a licensing issue. You are talking
about licensing issues. Do you think the licensing requirements on
plugins are too onerous?

Because of the non-standard interface, the most effective way for
people to write plugins for GCC today is to use something like MELT
(http://gcc-melt.org) or the GCC Python plugin
(https://fedorahosted.org/gcc-python-plugin/). These provide a
somewhat more standard interface across releases.

Ideally we would develop a standard interface for C as well. There
have been some efforts along those lines but as far as I know none of
them have been committed to the tree.

Ian

And even Eric responded as:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00182.html

Then I don't understand why David Kastrup's question was even controversial.

If I have failed to understand the background facts, I apologize and welcome
being corrected.

I hope you (and others) understand that I welcome chances to help the FSF's
projects when I believe doing so serves the hacker community as a whole. The
fact that I am currently working full-time on cleaning up the Emacs repoaitory
for full git conversion is only one instance of this.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

(emphasis mine)

[Marc Driftmeyer]

GCC has already lost on technical merits and mind share where it counts: investment.

[CrvenaZvezda]

I would rather listen to what RMS has to say about the subject.

[raineee]

ESR's comment is uninformed, and he has apologized for this.

[prodigy_]

I see this as a slow attempt to turn things proprietary and earn money by lock-in.

More like a lazy attempt at getting some free publicity. Mission accomplished, BTW. Thank you, Phoronix. /golfclap

[rudregues]

I don't think it matters. Clang isn't going to go away if GCC starts accepting non-free plugins, and i don't think it would even slightly slow down anything. That's not why people use clang.

Yes, it's about choice. What matters is the need, everyone will choose what best fit their need if there is a choose.

[BSDude]

I don't think it matters. Clang isn't going to go away if GCC starts accepting non-free plugins, and i don't think it would even slightly slow down anything. That's not why people use clang.

This^. Clang uses a completely different design philosophy and I bet it is interesting to the devs to see where it will take them.

[smitty3268]

Meh

I don't think it matters. Clang isn't going to go away if GCC starts accepting non-free plugins, and i don't think it would even slightly slow down anything. That's not why people use clang.

[rudregues]

I see this as a slow attempt to turn things proprietary and earn money by lock-in.

[endman]

What's next, I wonder, a proposal to relicense GCC under a BSD licence?

No, modify the law and take LLVM devs to the Free Software court and force them to re-license LLVM under GPLv3.

It'll teach Apple, B$D and all those Anti-GPL trolls a lesson.