Re: Converting the gcc backend to a library?

[Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot COM>]

Marc Espie writes:
> This is a fact we have to live with, but personally, I find this to be very
> much stupid from a technical point of view, and utterly paranoid.

Please avoid this kind of name-calling on the list.

> (If it were such an utter catastrophe, then I guess that OpenBSD, FreeBSD
> and NetBSD would have vanished from existence a few years back...)

I have a lot of respect for the BSD projects.  However, it can be
demonstrated that RMS's "stupidity" and "paranoia" is the reason why the
BSD projects have a free C++ compiler available (Mike Tiemann's employers
wanted to make g++ proprietary, just as NeXT wanted to make Objective-C
proprietary, and both researched ways around the GPL without success).
While RMS may be overly cautious, it's entirely appropriate to be careful
before getting rid of mechanisms that have demonstrably produced more free
software, and given the history, this caution is neither "very much
stupid" nor "utterly paranoid".

This does not mean that we can't make gcc much more modular than it is now.

> Not wanting this to degenerate into a flamewar, but I had to get this
> off my chest...

Next time you want to get something off your chest, please go rant on
gnu.misc.discuss or something.  Please don't waste everyone's time with
nonproductive copyleft vs noncopyleft flames on development lists.