On 2013-10-28 16:49, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
Surely, but we should have sympathy for Apple's desire to be able to
exert proprietary control over their products because ... ? :-)
Don't get me wrong, LLVM itself is a fantastic project, and as long as
people contribute great code to great free software projects I don't
really mind what their motivation is, but if Apple's goal is to avoid
the patent-related provisions of GPLv3, we could be in for a nasty
surprise at some point in the future if compiler-related patents Apple
holds become part of the battleground of the computing market.
From a purely technical point of view, Apple doesn't need a compiler
that supports a wide range of platforms, so GCC's much broader range of
hardware support is irrelevant to it. But it's an advantage GCC
continues to have in the bigger picture.
From what I've heard and read (mostly from WWDC videos) Apple doesn't
feel they can technically do what they want with a compiler with GCC.
I guess they technically can but it's too much work with the GCC code base.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
