Defending GCC considered futile • Hacker News Board

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#101

Post by eropple » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #47

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.

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 In the world of C/C++, I don't think being willfully ignorant of IDEs and automated refactoring means you are out of date in your technical knowledge, as the grandparent post implied.

I do. There's a reason that CLion is becoming a thing (can't happen fast enough) and Visual Assist has been a de facto standard in C++ development on Windows for years. The tools exist, they just don't exist in Emacs.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#102

Post by phkahler » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

Reading ESR tends to make me angry in a special way. I can understand people who prefer a BSD/MIT license over the GPL - they usually seem to understand the difference and claim the former are "more free" while kind of understanding the point of the later but disagreeing with its importance. But when I read ESR, he seems to have it in for the FSF and doesn't really seem to respect or even understand the philosophy at all. I've come to view him as a formerly-high-profile troll.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#103

Post by mdellabitta » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:03 PM UTC

jeremiep wrote: post #29

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.

The SDK I'm working with at the moment has been entirely coded in VIM and is the only layer between our code and the hardware. The fact that ESR doesn't use an IDE or automated refactoring is perfectly normal. It's those not able to work without using these tools who scare me.

Wanting an IDE is not the same thing as needing an IDE to be able to work. You're excluding a rather big middle, there.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#104

Post by throwaway90999 » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #80

throwaway90999 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is opening their codebase because they've been crushed by the enormous efforts of open source. This concession was hard won over the course of decades. Apple and Google do not contribute code freely, nor do they contribute a significant amount of their code. The contributions are limited to areas in which an advantage exists. One only has to look at the machinations present in other development platforms to…

" because they've been crushed by the enormous efforts of open source " As opposed to their own ineptitude (e.g. Vista and Windows 8) or the changing of the guard from original founders? I'm certain open source played a role, but I suspect a secondary one. Heck, if post XP Windows didn't suck so much, I and my parents (who nowadays run what I build them) would be using it instead of Linux for our desktops.

Vista and Windows 8 aren't the problem. Lack of presence on servers and mobile devices is the problem -- those are the two key spaces where OSS platforms have won out.

Linux is still not a significant player on desktops. Microsoft is still completely dominating that space.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#105

Post by j_s » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #68

josephg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Usu…

That pressupossition is not that unrealistic. For example, see shader compilers for GPUs. How many open shader compilers do you see around? Is there any motivation to open them? On the other side, during the 90's, we have seen many vendors come with new CPU ISAs, extensions of existing ISAs, new SOCs, etc. Many of them didn't have resources or will to write a new C compiler, so they wanted to use someting existing. T…

I am not very familiar with the world of shader compilers, but it seems like you have provided the most concrete example I've heard yet of how GCC benefited in the long term in a way that LLVM/clang didn't.

I would love to hear from anyone with more expertise in this realm who might be able to dispute this claim in any way... otherwise this seems to be a smoking gun in GCC's favor!

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#106

Post by davidw » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #100

davidw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I missing something, or is this fear of corporations totally unjustified? Sun Microsystems basically grabbed BSD development by hiring up a lot of good people and running with it. It took a while for the various free BSD's to come into their own. Basically, with "bsd licensed" software, if a big company hired up all the developers, they could take it proprietary and out-compete fork efforts. I don't think it hap…

> Basically, with "bsd licensed" software, if a big company hired up all the developers, they could take it proprietary and out-compete fork efforts. Well, look, sure, if you hire all the developers that are working on something and understand it, you can probably out-compete other implementations even if all you have the old developers do on your proprietary project is write up specs from which a different set of de…

My experience is that specs - even will written ones - are far enough from working, tested code that it's going to be significantly easier to take the BSD project proprietary than to build a competitor to a GPL licensed one from scratch. Also, to be attractive to the 'core group', I think working on new stuff is more interesting.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#107

Post by sanxiyn » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:07 PM UTC

berkut wrote: post #98

darkpore wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? http://imagine-rt.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/c-compiler-benchmar...

As the original author of that benchmark, I should point out that that was LLVM SVN (unreleased) against GCC 4.8 & 4.9 - I couldn't get GCC 5.0 SVN to build, so it's possible 5.0 will be faster again than LLVM in certain situations. However, I would also say that generally I've found LLVM is now producing faster code than GCC in most code I've tested both compilers with.

That is very interesting, because LLVM developers themselves admit LLVM generates slower code than GCC (in average). This is plain if you read LLVM Developers' Meeting talks.

I think it is completely possible that LLVM developers are using wrong benchmarks. Benchmarks are mostly SPEC and some large Google C++ codebases; in some sense both are quite atypical. But then, entire problem is to understand how typical codebases look like.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#108

Post by markhahn » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

Reading stuff from ESR considered a waste of time.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#109

Post by pekk » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:11 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #10

michaelhoffman wrote: post #4

Thankfully, Emacs maintainer Stefan Monnier is being sensible about this: > As mentioned earlier, in any case I will happily accept and install LLDB support into gud.el. So as long as I'm Emacs maintainer, your opinion on whether this might ruin the FSF's goals are not relevant. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

Yeah. What's especially painful is RMS is basically saying "Hey folks, I want to block this until I can research the issue." And then his research is "I don't know anuything about this, can anybody tell me what LLDB is?" My guess is (based on his past statements) that he doesn't browse the web, or browses it through emacs sending mail to him (really!) and doesn't use search so he can't really find out what LLDB is. D…

That isn't what his research is. I should think RMS has standing to ask for people to think about consequences of things like this.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#110

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 4:11 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #99

Aqueous wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - "The loud fanatics" who have no following certainly drop into irrelevance. I think if what you say were completely true we would not have had any movement forward on positions that were considered radical just 10 - 20 years ago - like same-sex marriage. It is only because certain people with large followings - Andrew Sullivan and others - began making a vocal argument for gay marriage, which wasn't even consid…

[deleted]

It very much was and is contrary to plenty of people's beliefs, it's just that the number of people who hold those beliefs has changed. For example in the very recent Alabama decision the people publicly opposing it explicitly say it's against their beliefs.