Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Defending GCC considered futile

lists.gnu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 209 posts

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#131

Post by Demiurge »

maxlybbert wrote: post #121
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…

This is a common belief. It is, I believe, the reason Stallman wrote the GPL and the reason Torvalds continues to use the GPL 2. But Eric Raymond convinced me that it's irrelevant ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=928 ): "If we live in 'Type A' a universe where closed source is more efficient, markets will eventually punish people who take closed source code open. Markets will correspondingly reward people who take open so…

What if we live in a universe that is of Type C, in which the market favors complicated combination of factors of which 'open source' is a very minor one, and market positioning with technical prowess of software is the major one, whereby software is opened or closed based on specific political circumstances, such that the timing and not the direction is important?

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#132

Post by tedks »

cynicalkane wrote: post #54
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…

This is false--people are just as likely to respond to opposing arguments with rejection and ideological hardening. This is replicated in psychological studies. In my personal experience, the less the opposing position acknowledges the values of its opponents, the more likely it is to be rejected. Most people reason by mood affiliation and use argumentation as a social tool, so this should not be a surprise. I think…

>In my personal experience, the less the opposing position acknowledges the values of its opponents, the more likely it is to be rejected.

As far as I know regarding persuasion psychology, this is false. These are the psychological studies you are appealing to.

If you have a more substantiative argument I suggest you cite these, but it'd be news to me.

Arguments virtually never convince anyone, so this is all a moot point.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#133

Post by pnathan »

lultimouomo wrote: post #3

ESR seems a bit over the line with this mail, but what never ceases to amaze me is how RMS is disconnected with the present technology: >From its name, I guess that LLDB is a noncopylefted debugger and that some might intend it to replace GDB. But I don't know if that is so. This is just one of many, in the recent arguments he has stated several times that he doesn't understand how automated code refactoring works, h…

ear periodically shoves his oar into the FSF world, occasionally with faint malice about the whole business. He really isn't into Free software as much as he is into Open software. You can't read him as a disinterested techie and come away with correct views.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#134

Post by pekk »

I strongly disagree with RMS on some issues (like Snowden) and I don't share his hard line on proprietary software either. But RMS is just a particular kind of animal. I respect the need for that animal in a diverse ecosystem and I respect the reasoning behind free software.

In particular, I think gcc has played an essential role in providing free software to users because it is licensed under the GPL. The BSD license is great for less important things, but the moment giant corporations have engineered the whole "open source" ecosystem so that they can distribute forks of all the basic build tools without contributing changes to the public where we can see and influence them - that's the moment we've handed over the keys to the kingdom. You have to be pretty out of touch with history not to see that point.

To hear the way HN talks about RMS, he is a nerdy, smelly, arrogant, technically ignorant Emmanuel Goldstein, representing everything we hate most about the nerdy computing world that pre-existed the current startup gold rush (but which, coincidentally, entirely enabled it and us). Now a large proportion of us here secretly harbor the belief that we are the next Steve Jobs, so we pine for the good old days when people like that made bank on companies whose business models were entirely based on platform lock-in. Because so few of us actually remember how fucked up it really was for all the users and programmers. Because we don't consider ourselves users and programmers, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and Chief Engineering Architect Engineers. So it's no wonder that HN still doesn't understand the point of GPL. Just like most of Marin county now thinks measles is something to cultivate, like acidophilus.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#135

Post by JoshTriplett »

maxlybbert wrote: post #121
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…

This is a common belief. It is, I believe, the reason Stallman wrote the GPL and the reason Torvalds continues to use the GPL 2. But Eric Raymond convinced me that it's irrelevant ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=928 ): "If we live in 'Type A' a universe where closed source is more efficient, markets will eventually punish people who take closed source code open. Markets will correspondingly reward people who take open so…

That assumes a company writing its own closed-source software is capable of keeping up with an entire community. If that were the case, we'd have had a proprietary version of the Linux kernel long ago, and it'd have completely replaced Linux in all the areas where Linux currently thrives.

Also, assuming the case that Open Source is more efficient, some of us don't want to wait around for inefficient closed-source-based companies to fold, because they can use the large savings they're sitting on to take a very long time thrashing around and doing damage before dying or adapting. If copyleft licenses can speed that process up, great.

Finally, there's a false dichotomy here: closed-source and open-source are not on a single scale of goodness measured by "efficiency", and the market does not perfectly adjust to maximize efficiency.

ESR's type-A and type-B universes both presuppose free markets and perfect market efficiency. There's a difference between wanting that and assuming that it's already the case.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#136

Post by [deleted] »

cwyers wrote: post #44
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…

[deleted]

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#137

Post by pgeorgi »

j_s wrote: post #105
vetinari wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

There are some llvm based shader compilers out there. Some even open (AMD), some not (Nvidia).

The situation with architectures in 90s sounds about right: Those that were kept closed (and where a gcc backend was thus no option for the vendor - mostly embedded stuff) have to this day shitty compilers with unpredictable optimizers.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#138

Post by throwaway90999 »

DannyBee wrote: post #114
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…

"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." This is simply false, actually. But of course, you have no evidence of this, only rhetoric, while i actually see literally every code contribution google makes.

By all means contradict me. Do they open source more than 25% of their code written?

More than 10%?

More than 1%?

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#139

Post by GalacticDomin8r »

j_s wrote: post #105
vetinari wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I'm not sure about the exact conclusion you seem to draw but it seems to be something like "GPL projects tend to have better outcomes than non-GPL". The whole point of the thread doesn't support that conclusion coming directly from the GCC brain trust. It's only natural that niche GCC users are going to hang around the longest.

I'd also like to note LLVM/clang didn't gain large non-apple marketshare until GCC adopted GPLv3 which has more to with it's stagnation than anything IMO. v2 is palatable to many business needs, v3 is not.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#140

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

phkahler wrote: post #102

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…

Remember that ESR writes things like this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5001 in all apparent seriousness.
Post reply on HN