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Clang and FSF's strategy

gcc.gnu.org

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Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#101

Post by calroc »

dragonwriter wrote: post #90
chimeracoder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for not compromising on their principles[0]. From your linked post: > You are crossposting to two public project lists of the GNU project with inflammatory language and mischaracterizations. You have been involved with the GNU project long enough to be well aware th…

> It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for not compromising on their principles Why should I respect someone for sticking with principles that are misguided? The whole idea that "sticking to principles" is a virtue independent of the merits of the principles involved is perverse. Its even more perverse when th…

Can we be sure these principles are misguided if no one sticks to them?

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#102

Post by dragonwriter »

calroc wrote: post #101
dragonwriter wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for not compromising on their principles Why should I respect someone for sticking with principles that are misguided? The whole idea that "sticking to principles" is a virtue independent of the merits of the principles involved is perverse. Its even more perverse when th…

Can we be sure these principles are misguided if no one sticks to them?

Whether principles are misguided or not is a subjective, not an objective, question. Its not something you can "be sure of".

OTOH, if no one sticks to them, that would be evidence against them being widely viewed as important principles.

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#103

Post by bad_user »

anon1385 wrote: post #59
jjindev wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a digression, but it is slightly more complicated. The top US software companies, by market cap, all use FSF tools, but then in turn decide their own separate levels of openness. Entrepreneurs here will use FSF tools, and then decide how far to open their own kimonos. The original FSF intent, that copyleft would provide contagion to a truly open world seems actually stalled. Apologies for the digression.

It largely stalled because of the web. Lots of SV startups for example are using GPL'd code, but because they only provide web apps they don't have to release their code. Worse still those startups often think they are on the 'good' side of the free software debate because they use some open source code in their products and maybe even contribute a bit back. In my opinion the FSF screwed up majorly by concentrating o…

IMHO, the fact that the GPL covers only distribution and not usage (i.e. the GPL is NOT an EULA), is the reason for why I consider it a free software license.

AGPL never took off because AGPL is not really free and should have never happened. Unfortunately the FSF is blinded by these so called "dangers" in their fight against proprietary stuff, totally ignoring that AGPL in practice is only used purely for marketing reasons in dual-licensing schemes, there are no communities around AGPL projects and OSI doesn't really give a shit. As a consequence, AGPL is now posturing as a free software / open source license.

> Worse still those startups often think they are on the 'good' side of the free software debate because they use some open source code in their products and maybe even contribute a bit back.

You're making it sound as if that's a bad thing.

The web is the most open distribution platform. The alternative to the web is not FSF's GNU, but rather the iTunes App Store, Google Play, Amazon's Appstore and the Windows Store. And compared to 15 years ago, the barrier to entry for kids wanting to experiment with building and distributing software is very low and the web in combination with open-source tools, libraries and platforms have made it possible. I also hate this holier-than-thou attitude.

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#104

Post by msbarnett »

jordigh wrote: post #82
kps wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the fancy static analysis that Xcode does is completely tied to clang, for example. Xcode doesn't do static analysis; Clang/LLVM does, and it's perfectly possible to do it from the command line, or embed it in other tools. (This is an example of the difference between LLVM's modular library architecture and GCC plugins — LLVM doesn't insist on being ‘on top’.)

So it is easily replaceable? You could easily tell xcode to use gcc if gcc supported the same kind of static analysis? How would you do this?

If GCC supported that (and if Xcode supported GCC's support of it), you'd probably tell Xcode to use it the same way you tell Xcode to build with GCC instead of clang: You'd select the option in your project settings.

Nobody's made the claim that Xcode is some kind of magical dynamic IDE that supports arbitrary hypothetical features of arbitrary hypothetical versions of arbitrary compilers that you can mix and match on the fly.

Nevertheless it is the case that Xcode allows you to select between clang and GCC 4.2 backends.

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#105

Post by Smegger »

protomyth wrote: post #95
nickbauman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Don't forget one of the most striking differences between free software vs open source software is the promotion of a community of people who add to the public knowledge of software engineering, not merely to make better software artifacts. If you had to choose, which would you foster? An individual truth or a community of truth seekers? FSF is clearly about the latter.

I guess I see it a bit different and GCC is a pretty good example. LLVM and clang can be used in pretty much any project. They have provided every developer tools to use in anyway we wish. GCC's parts cannot be included in other projects because they are licensed in such a way that tells us that the GCC code is more important than the code we are using. Why does a 1,000 line GPL count for more than 100,000 lines of s…

Personally I think that GCC would do much better under something like LGPL that way it could be used much more like Clang but still not sacrifice their principles. As the LGPL is one of their approved and favoured licences already it shouldn't be a problem for them.

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#106

Post by fafner »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #27
fafner wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GCC receives a lot of undeserved hate at the moment. It is still a very good compiler which constantly improves. E.g., for my projects it generates better (faster) code. But still there are a lot of flame comments made against GCC. It was very similar when Chrome was released and suddenly the web was filled with flame comments against Firefox. I think one problem is that many developers on Apple systems think…

I definitely don't hate GCC, for a long time it was the best free compiler that I knew so I am really grateful to the people that made it possible. But honestly, after seeing the error messages of Clang compared to those of GCC, I have zero intention of going back to GCC. It may be that GCC generates better code (to be honest, I don't know) but 99% of the time that I'm using a compiler, I'm interacting with the error…

GCC error messages aren't that bad. Could it be that you compare the old Apple GCC to the latest clang?

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#107

Post by mcguire »

lazyjones wrote: post #2

esr seems to conflate technical differences with political issues here. clang is not superior in some areas because it isn't GPL'd. It's because it is a newer project with more resources and different priorities. Sure, it attracted some developers who didn't like gcc's and the FSF's policies, but so do all kinds of crappy proprietary products. The point is, gcc doesn't need to relax its policies to better compete wit…

ESR's response to Ian Taylor:

"Then I don't understand why David Kastrup's question was even controversial.

"If I have failed to understand the background facts, I apologize and welcome being corrected.

"I hope you (and others) understand that I welcome chances to help the FSF's projects when I believe doing so serves the hacker community as a whole. The fact that I am currently working full-time on cleaning up the Emacs repoaitory for full git conversion is only one instance of this."

(I haven't been following ESR (not being part of his tribe and all), nor have I really been following Emacs. Do the other Emacs folks know about his "clean-up" there? Is it going to go any better than his clean up of the Linux kernel build system?)

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#108

Post by fafner »

anon1385 wrote: post #20
fafner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using gcc's AST to do anything is an horrible nightmare, and you pretty much have to fork the whole gcc code base to do that anyway. GCC supports Plugins which allow you to access all internal structures. > Those things are not going to be easy to change because GCC wasn't designed to account those needs. They are working towards modularization. It will certainly not be an easy task. But I hope they accomplish that…

>They are working towards modularization. It will certainly not be an easy task. But I hope they accomplish that. gcc-xml was already written and the gcc devs refused to merge it. Has that changed in the last year?

When was that? 10 years ago?

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#109

Post by fafner »

belorn wrote: post #24
anon1385 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are working towards modularization. It will certainly not be an easy task. But I hope they accomplish that. gcc-xml was already written and the gcc devs refused to merge it. Has that changed in the last year?

http://gccxml.github.io/HTML/News.html Looks quite dead to me, and I recall reading that the author do not recommend using it anymore.

There are still commits (latest ~1 month ago) https://github.com/gccxml/gccxml/commits/master

Re: Clang and FSF's strategy

#110

Post by fafner »

protomyth wrote: post #95
nickbauman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Don't forget one of the most striking differences between free software vs open source software is the promotion of a community of people who add to the public knowledge of software engineering, not merely to make better software artifacts. If you had to choose, which would you foster? An individual truth or a community of truth seekers? FSF is clearly about the latter.

I guess I see it a bit different and GCC is a pretty good example. LLVM and clang can be used in pretty much any project. They have provided every developer tools to use in anyway we wish. GCC's parts cannot be included in other projects because they are licensed in such a way that tells us that the GCC code is more important than the code we are using. Why does a 1,000 line GPL count for more than 100,000 lines of s…

> GCC's parts cannot be included in other projects because they are licensed in such a way that tells us that the GCC code is more important than the code we are using.

That's simply not true.

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