Weddington, Eric wrote:
From: Manuel López-Ibáñez [mailto:lopeziba...@gmail.com]
The fact is that it is (perceived as) more difficult to contribute to
GCC than LLVM/Clang for the reasons we all know already.
From my perspective (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) it is easier for LLVM
to do such marketing
and focus on usability details because they seem to have a central driver to
the project,
whether person/group (founder(s)/champion(s)). GCC is, what I would call,
aggressively decentralized;
Who would do such marketing? Who decides what marketing to do? Who decides the
usability details?
Who would work on it? GCC is the epitome of the saying "If you want something done,
do it yourself."
There is no central authority who can, or will, make a decision about this.
There is a Steering Committee for GCC, but as they keep saying at the GCC
Summits,
their power and scope is very limited.
Well, it is an open question (at least to me) whether you *want* a
central driver.
In late 2003, three national laboratories in the US wrote up a position
paper on their needs in Fortran-land, and lamented the lack of a free
Fortran compiler (they noted that there was g77, but it wasn't up to
speed in Fortran-95 land, which they needed).
This was my reply:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/fortran/2003-11/msg00052.html
With that answer, I essentially tossed $ 5 million away (the amount they
estimated to be needed for a free Fortran 95 compiler, because, in a
followup mail, I said "Anyway, we will produce a Fortran 95 compiler,
regardless."
--
Toon Moene - e-mail: t...@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html
