Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 02:34:38PM -0500, Diego Novillo wrote:
> Joe Buck wrote:
> >On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 09:20:21AM +0100, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
> >>Is there any progress in the gcc-plugin project ?
> >
> >Non-technical holdups.  RMS is worried that this will make it too easy
> >to integrate proprietary code directly with GCC.
> 
> I don't believe this is a strong argument.  My contention is, and has 
> always been, that GCC is _already_ trivial to integrate into a 
> proprietary compiler.  There is at least one compiler I know that does this.

I agree, but we still have the roadblock.

Maybe we need a group of volunteers to meet with RMS in person and work on
convincing him.  E-mail seems way too inefficient and frustrating a
mechanism.

RMS regularly points to the examples of C++ and Objective-C as an argument
for trying to force all extensions to be GPL (Mike Tiemann's employer
tried to figure out a way of making g++ proprietary; NeXT tried a
"user does the link" hack to get around the GPL for their original
Objective-C compiler).

Problem is, he hasn't really kept up; the problem with being as pure as
he is is that you can become isolated from what's going on.