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Defending GCC considered futile

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Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#41

Post by dekhn »

Aqueous wrote: post #33

Despite the inflexibility of RMS' arguments (they grate on me as much as anyone) I feel like his position on continuing to develop GCC without modern features like a fully exposed AST is necessary to keep the "moderate" position where it is. In other words, RMS' radical position is necessary for 'moderate' LLVM to exist. Otherwise we'd still be living in the Borland/Metrowerks/Microsoft world of the 90s - proprietary…

Similarly in negotiating there is a term 'blue sky proposal' which is so extreme that people end up shifting their acceptable terms.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#42

Post by arca_vorago »

Can someone explain to me what all the hubub is about. As far as I understand it and even as RMS himself states, isn't this mostly about them trying to block clang/LLVM tie ins to the debugger more than anything else?

I don't understand whats with all the gcc sucks attitude these days. It's worked for quite some time, and yes it's showing some age due to the lack of development so it has lagged behind others, but we should all be worried when people very influential in the GNU community start talking about why GCC is bad.

I don't like this line of thinking at all.

If GCC is behind, fork it and do what needs to be done to make it competitive.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#43

Post by davidw »

zanny wrote: post #11

So this was a discussion in /r/linux last week about LLVM and GCC et al, so I'm just reposting my statements on why a world where GCC is irrelevant is bad: It takes little effort on Apples or Googles or Microsofts part to take advantage of an LLVM dominated world to close off their own changes to it and try to force developers to use their own proprietary LLVM distributions on their own operating systems. It stops ev…

Probably the best way to avoid this is to make sure all the eggs (developers) never end up in any one basket. Apple is a big risk there.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#44

Post by cwyers »

alayne wrote: post #13

I don't know why you would make this argument now. Stallman argued clearly in January why copyleft was more important to him than technical superiority. https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html

Everybody already knew that copyleft was more important to Stallman than technical superiority. The problem is that there are a lot of people who put a higher value on technical superiority than copyleft. Those people could be counted upon as GCC users and contributors as long as GCC was the technically best compiler available as open source (all free software is open source, not all open source is free software, etc.).

RMS's goal seems to be to have GCC not be replaced by LLVM. From a reply downthread of ESR's post:

> This means it is more than a potential problem.

> The possible harm is to replace copylefted GNU package with noncopylefted code. They must have worked for a long long time to replace the capabilities GDB already had.

So RMS thinks it's a "problem" and "harmful" if lldb replaced gdb. So RMS cares not just about what GCC does, but whether or not other people adopt GCC as well. In terms of that goal, it does not matter what RMS considers more important. RMS is not going to convince everyone else to use GCC instead of LLVM by simply restating his arguements about copyleft forcefully again and again. That doesn't mean he has to sacrifice his feelings about copyleft. But it does mean he has to give a damn about being technically superior to LLVM and lldb if he wants to beat them.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#45

Post by Htsthbjig »

hywel wrote: post #6

> Already my own experiments suggest that LLVM is a superior compiler, by every metric I know of Except that it isn't copyleft, which is one of the most important metrics to Stallman, FSF et al, and is why they're unlikely to stop defending it.

It is copyleft. In fact they leave you more rights to copy the source than GPL.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#46

Post by philh »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #5

This is pretty much the perfect moment for two egos like RMS and ESR to clash. RMS is already getting a lot of flak for expressing his fear of GCC being displaced in such a manner, whereas ESR is well known for his disliking RMS, to put it mildly.

ESR disagrees with RMS on many issues. I don't think he dislikes him. "Ours has always been a more complex relationship than most people understand." http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5211

(ESR is well known for many things that aren't true.)

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#47

Post by rayiner »

Tomte wrote: post #21
rayiner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about a C compiler and debugger. Lots of very technically knowledgable people shun IDEs and automated refactoring in that space.

Sure, that's a valid choice. But when you're implementing a language ecosystem, proud ignorance of other peoples' usage patterns is just embarassing.

Does proud ignorance of IDEs indicate that RMS may be impolitic or undiplomatic? Yes. Does it indicate he "is disconnected with the present technology?" In the world of C/C++, I don't think being willfully ignorant of IDEs and automated refactoring means you are out of date in your technical knowledge, as the grandparent post implied.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#48

Post by antientropic »

hywel wrote: post #6

> Already my own experiments suggest that LLVM is a superior compiler, by every metric I know of Except that it isn't copyleft, which is one of the most important metrics to Stallman, FSF et al, and is why they're unlikely to stop defending it.

This suggests that the FSF should create a GPL-licensed fork a Clang/LLVM. Such a fork could continue to receive all upstream improvements (since they're under a more liberal license), but not the other way around - the upstream project would not be able to use patches licensed under the GPL. Thus (in theory) it could end up being strictly superior to the original.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#49

Post by josephg »

zanny wrote: post #11

So this was a discussion in /r/linux last week about LLVM and GCC et al, so I'm just reposting my statements on why a world where GCC is irrelevant is bad: It takes little effort on Apples or Googles or Microsofts part to take advantage of an LLVM dominated world to close off their own changes to it and try to force developers to use their own proprietary LLVM distributions on their own operating systems. It stops ev…

I'm always confused by this stance. It presupposes that big companies like Apple and Google will at some point become bad actors in the opensource world. (They both contribute huge amounts of code). Even Microsoft is starting to open up their codebase with the release of huge parts of the .NET ecosystem.

Frankly, I want the big boys on my side when it comes to opensource code. I want them to use the code I write. Usually I indirectly benefit from them using my code anyway, and they benefit, and everyone's happy. This is true even if they decide to make proprietary changes which don't get pushed upstream. I gain influence in my community and lucrative job offers. I get invited to talk at tech conferences, and my projects (present and future) attract more attention. I honestly don't see the downside here.

Apple might have a change of leadership and decide to swim against the current and make LLVM proprietary, but if that happens can't we just fork it? As far as I can see, MariaDB is doing just fine. And until that happens (which will probably be never), we can get some huge compiler ecosystem improvements on Apple's dime. All opensource.

Am I missing something, or is this fear of corporations totally unjustified?

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#50

Post by ekianjo »

microtonal wrote: post #38
Tomte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's a valid choice. But when you're implementing a language ecosystem, proud ignorance of other peoples' usage patterns is just embarassing.

Is RMS still involved with gcc at all? (Non-philosophically?)

He claims not doing any development himself for several years now, so I guess this means no.
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