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Defending GCC considered futile

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Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#161

Post by DannyBee »

deong wrote: post #141
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 som…

The only open problem here is the one i stated "serious loop transforms". Parallelization is not even "hard", it's just hard for languages like C++. Fortran compilers have been parallelization for 20+years

The rest (effective cache/register/op usage) is all subsumed by cost models for polyhedral loop transforms. See PLUTO (http://www.ece.lsu.edu/jxr/pluto/) and PLUTO+ (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2688512)

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#162

Post by DannyBee »

sanxiyn wrote: post #144
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?

For any interesting type of vectorization we want to do, the problem is not "can we figure out what to vectorize" it's "how long do we want to spend vectorizing code" :)

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#163

Post by hga »

dekhn wrote: post #142
nawitus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The whole TCP/IP stack came from BSD. It was already pretty much the standard one. So back to August 1994 per Wikipedia and my rough memory.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#164

Post by CamperBob2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #37
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.

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

The first thing I do when beginning work with a new embedded platform is figure out how to bypass whatever wacky IDE its vendor wants their customers to use.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#165

Post by saidajigumi »

weenie wrote: post #24
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…

You have to realize that RMS's goal isn't to "steer important projects", and you should give him more credit in that he probably could be "connected with the present technology" if he wanted to. The fact that "he doesn't know enough anymore" doesn't say much about Stallman; instead it says a lot about how his goal of making sure software is libre has been shoved aside by everyone else for other priorities. Also, RMS…

it says a lot about how his goal of making sure software is libre has been shoved aside by everyone else for other priorities.

I'd call this a deep problem with how the FSF has operated to-date. It's not that libre software isn't important, or hasn't had a huge impact on the software world. But the very idea that it should be perceived as the ultimate priority in the existence of software is wrong. That viewpoint fails to understand or acknowledge how people use software and what other important risks they perceive and face related to software. As such, our libre utopia falls apart because we didn't understand that it had to be inhabited by real humans.

he probably could be "connected with the present technology" if he wanted to.

Case in point. Understanding how people use and are affected by "present technology" is key to follow-on innovations after copyleft. IMO, a significant risk to libre software is that its social innovation has not continued to adapt to the changing software landscape. For a time, that was fine because we had the heyday of free software's expansion to worry about. But there's been this tacit (or maybe explicit) assumption in the community that the GPL and "belief" in libre software are enough. But in fact, I'll posit that the real goal is to build sustaining social infrastructure for free software and information culture.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#166

Post by CamperBob2 »

josephg wrote: post #49
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. Usu…

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

To resolve your confusion in this area, perhaps you should consult an Oracle.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#168

Post by cynicalkane »

leovonl wrote: post #119
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…

There's an enormous difference between having an opinion which is not aligned with mainstream and being a radical. The radical usually wants the world to convert to his/hers own views, which is why they tend to get closed minded and hard to talk with as they get older.

I do not understand why this post is downvoted. That there is a very large difference between "an opinion which is not aligned with mainstream" and the type of fanatical opinion here called "radical"--this should not be a controversial opinion.

Some people label all undesired opinions "radical" but that is obviously not what this poster is talking about.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#169

Post by danielweber »

dekhn wrote: post #41
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.

There is also overplaying your hand and making the other person leave the room.

Re: Defending GCC considered futile

#170

Post by madmax96 »

Isn't RMS' main issue with LLVM that people can create proprietary plugins and those plugins benefit when LLVM benefits? How exactly is this different than if a company were to make proprietary extensions to Emacs and sell them? Does the Emacs license forbid against non-free extensions? Ultimately, it's not LLVM's problem if people create non-free extensions. You could argue all of Gnu/Linux is bad because some proprietary software runs on it. I don't think that's a route we want to take.
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