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Defending GCC considered futile

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Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#141

Post by deong »

DannyBee wrote: post #122

Eric is right, but not for the right reasons. For starters, Apple's money is not the main driver of LLVM (In fact, publicly, Apple is not the #1 contributor anymore). Second, "but merely the fact that compiler technology has advanced significantly in ways that GCC is not well positioned to exploit. " is simply false In fact, that's exactly the problem for GCC: Compiler technology has not advanced roughly at all . GCC…

There are still plenty of open problems in compilers. For instance, writing a program to effectively use all four of my CPU cores is pretty tedious. It would be awfully nice if my compiler could automatically parallelize operations, do effective register allocation across cores, distribute data for best use of L1 cache, etc.

Certainly researchers who are working on this sort of thing today are doing it in LLVM or some custom framework. I can't imagine GCC has any significant traction at least.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#142

Post by dekhn »

nawitus wrote: post #95
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…

That might have been true in the past, but I don't see it being true these days. Lots of companies are only now figuring out the benefits of free software. Just look at Microsoft for one example.

Some of the older network tools in Windows (nslookup, etc) are actually dervied from BSD. That was done... 20 years ago now?

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#143

Post by rjzzleep »

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…

as crazy as RMS may sound in his exchanges usually don't forget that some people didn't read past the first messages. read another message RMS responded here https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

that's in response to the offer llvm made to give hand the copyright over to the FSF and integrate llvm to gcc. I had long been wondering why there was a llvm-gcc on apple machines a couple revisions back.

basically he claims he didn't see the original llvm offer:

    >> "If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC,
    >> I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the
    >> copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these
    >> details."

   > I am stunned to see that we had this offer.
   > Now, based on hindsight, I wish we had accepted it.
    
   >If I had seen it back then, I would not have had the benefit of
   > hindsight, but it would clearly have been a real possibility.  Nothing
   > would have ruled it out.
    
   > I wish I had known about the offer.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#144

Post by sanxiyn »

DannyBee wrote: post #122

Eric is right, but not for the right reasons. For starters, Apple's money is not the main driver of LLVM (In fact, publicly, Apple is not the #1 contributor anymore). Second, "but merely the fact that compiler technology has advanced significantly in ways that GCC is not well positioned to exploit. " is simply false In fact, that's exactly the problem for GCC: Compiler technology has not advanced roughly at all . GCC…

Have we solved vectorization yet, or does that belong to loop transforms?

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

glesica wrote: post #123
dragonwriter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that "he doesn't know enough anymore" doesn't say much about Stallman Yeah, actually, it does: specifically, its says a lot about his qualifications to apply theoretical ideals to real world situations. To intelligently plan how to achieve the goals of the ideology, you need more than devotion to and deep understanding of the ideology, you need deep understanding of the existing context to understand the p…

But RMS has never really been pragmatic in the sense I think you mean here. RMS is the spiritual leader, other people have always done a lot of the implementation. When the principles collide with the ability to do some specific thing, RMS has pretty much always come down on the side of the principles. This is nothing new. Just because you disagree with some of the results of his principles, probably because you're f…

> But RMS has never really been pragmatic in the sense I think you mean here.

I didn't use "pragmatic" as an adjective describing RMS or a role RMS might be in at all, so I'm not really sure what you are saying. RMS is, and has for a long time been, acting in the role that I stated that the "he doesn't know enough anymore" [about the way working developers now actually build software] claim is relevant to his suitability, which is simply making specific recommendations about what software features and usage restrictions should, or should not, be present to achieve the goals of his ideology.

> Just because you disagree with some of the results of his principles

My position on Stallman's principles is orthogonal to my belief that his particular recommended policies are often counterproductive to achieving his stated principles. The post you are responding to is about the latter, not the former.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#146

Post by Anderkent »

throwaway90999 wrote: post #138
DannyBee wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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%?

That's not what you claimed. You claimed they do not contribute code freely; they certainly do. It might not be a very significant percentage if their code written, but it's a fact that they contribute code to open source projects, and they do not charge for it.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#147

Post by Joky »

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…

Imagination just released their IR. LLVM has a backend for AMD GPUs. It's moving, slowly but it's moving...

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#148

Post by Joky »

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…

Imagination just released their IR. LLVM has a backend for AMD GPUs. It's moving, slowly but it's moving...

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#149

Post by angersock »

NickPollard wrote: post #92
pjmlp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the UNIX world. In the game development world, embedded systems and desktops we like our IDEs.

You can only speak for yourself. Lots of game developers, including myself, do not commonly use heavyweight IDEs.

1. Are you a professional--i.e., making rent off of it--game developer?

2. Are you developing for consoles or PCs, or for some other platform?

3. Do you program in a language that benefits from IDEs, specifically C, C++, C#, or Java?

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#150

Post by maxlybbert »

Demiurge wrote: post #131
maxlybbert wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm sure you're capable of doing that analysis yourself, but in my opinion, the GPL wouldn't provide any more benefits to a Type C universe than it provides in a Type A or Type B universe.
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