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Re: Ada & JGNAT
On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 09:49:34 +0100 Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> wrote:
> A worry has always been that you could write a proprietary compiler
> and use gcc's back end. You could do this without violating the GPL
> by making the two passes of the compiler separate programs. The first
> proprietary part would output some kind of intermediate form, the
> second part would read that and generate code. We don't want that to
> happen: we would rather have free front ends.
a) How does this relate to JGNAT? How does an Ada->Bytecode compiler fit
into the above scenario?
b) If someone already has a program that produces Java bytecode (or .NET
IL for that matter), why would he want to feed that into GCC? A program
that produces Java bytecode is already a complete compiler for the Java
platform and a compiler that produces .NET IL is a complete compiler for
the .NET platform. What more could you want?
c) A lot of compilers are already implemented in the way you describe,
using C/C++ as the intermediate language to feed into GCC. I've never
heard the claim that this subverts the GPL. In fact several compilers that
use this technique are distributed under the GPL.
MSB
--
Being a computer expert is not so much about what you know
but about how fast you can learn something when you need it.