Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Richard Stallman writes:
 > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
 > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
 > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
 > 
 >     > Whatever features we put in Emacs for interacting with a compiler in
 >     > any fashion should work with GCC.
 > 
 >     Only to the extent that GCC supports that feature.
 > 
 > This decision applies also to features that GCC doesn't yet support.
 > The outcome we want is that GCC supports them and Emacs uses GCC.
 > 
 > Emacs should not aim to advance by helping LLVM push GCC down.
 > 
 > If you need specific features added to GCC, please tell me.

In this particular case, you've been told that outputting fully
annotated ASTs is a desirable feature, and you decided it's a bad idea
(for software freedom) to support it because it allows nonfree
frontends and backends to be written for GCC backends and frontends
respectively.  So you've opposed GCC support for that feature.

In this case you need to choose between allowing any LLVM feature to
be supported because it's free software, or saying LLVM may be free
software but the feature it supports that GCC doesn't is freedom-
denying, and therefore no matter how useful it may be, Emacs is not
going to support that feature.