Re: Contradictiory directions

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Seriously, let's stop making up dramas based on scenarios disconnected
> from reality.

FWIW I agree about this point.

> ... about Gcc either, because there are better *free* alternatives,
> which arose in great part thanks to stances like this.

But this is a poorly chosen example.  LLVM was developed originally
because it was easier to start from scratch than to evolve an existing
system that had accrued a lot of (necessary) complexity.  Back then it
was mostly a vehicle for academic research and I've never seen any hint
that circumventing the GPL was part of the motivation.

Then it got picked up by companies (mostly Apple) specifically because
it didn't use the GPL, because they did not want to be forced to
released their source code (this can be seen as the price we had to pay
for GCC to get Objective C support, since many years earlier, NeXT was
forced to release their Objective C compiler's source code because it
was built on top of GCC, and Jobs really resented that; it's arguably
also the reason why macOS has switched to Zsh and remained at Emacs-22).

AFAIK the issue with support for plugins only appeared much later.

So in the case of LLVM-vs-GCC, the reason for the heavy investment into
LLVM is not so much the FSF's "stance" on anything, it's an opposition
to the core principle of the GPL.

And oddly enough, last I checked, GCC is still pretty damn competitive
with LLVM, despite all that investment, so "better" is debatable ;-)


        Stefan