On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 12:17:07PM +0100, devuan...@spamgourmet.net wrote: > > GCC was deliberately making things interdepend on each other, even > without technical reasons, simply to prevent commercial entities to > replace the e.g. front-end of the compiler with some proprietary code > and then have that use the GPL backend. This would enable a new, > proprietary language to leverage all the optimizations gcc has.
This happened, except for the proprietry part, with Modula 3. The currently most common Modula 3 compiler has been fitted with a back end generating intermediate code acceptable to a modified gcc back end. The modifications to the back end consist mainly of code that reads in intermediate code from a file instead of getting it passed in from previous passes in memmory. Modula 3 is released under the SRC public license, which is somewhat more free than the GPL. But it has been declared incompatible with the GPL by the FSF, so Modula 3 compilation always has to go though this efficency-destroying inrermediate file. Modula 3 is no longer of any interest to the SRC (or its legal successors) so there's no hope of getting them to change the license. >... > > https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/ covers the most recent flare-up when > somebody wanted to make the AST of GCC accessible. There's a good quote in the comments to this article: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code". -- hendrik _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
