On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 5:04 PM Thomas Koenig via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote: > > David, > > for some reason or other, I did not get your mail, so I will > just reply copying in from the archive. > > First, thanks for injecting some sanity into the discussion. > > I will not discuss RMS' personal shortcomings or the lack of them. > In today's toxic political climate, such allegations are often > made up and weaponized without an effective defense for the > alleged wrongdoer. I don't know the truth of the matter, and I make > a point of not finding out. > > > In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been > > an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang (I've > > added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a > > static analysis pass) > > And this is highly welcome, and has made gcc (including gfortran) a much > better compiler. I well remember how you implemented the much better > colored error messages that gfortran has now. > > > Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable as > > libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have > > helped (and still could; can we do that please?) > > That makes perfect sense, as LLVM shows, and is something that the > steering committee could decide for the project (or rather, it could > issue a pronouncement that this will not be opposed if some volunteer > does it). > > I think this could be as close to an unanimous decision as there can > be among such a diverse community as the gcc developers. If the FSF > takes umbrage at this, the ball is in their court.
Andrew Macleod led a BOF at GNU Cauldron 2013 that discussed re-architecting and modularizing GCC along these same lines. The header flattening was one step. Thanks, David