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Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?
> 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 believe that any such compiler would violate the GPL. But I also believe
it's not in the best interest of the FSF to litigate that matter if the
linkage between the compiler is anything other than linked in a single
executable. Therefore, I think it's important for us to make it as
technically hard as possible for people to do such a linkage by readin and
writing tree or communicating as different libraries or DLLs. I'm very
much against any sort of "plug in" precisely for this reason.
> IMO, the benefits we gain in making GCC a more attractive code base, far
> outweigh the fears of someone co-opting it for their own proprietary uses.
That depends on the importance you attach to the philosophy of free
software. I suspect RMS attaches much more importance to that than anybody
on this list.