Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

dewar@gnat.com wrote:
> 
> <<A bunch, for instance Playstations 1 and 2.  In fact, for some
> embedded MIPS variants GCC is the only compiler available; the users
> of those will be most unhappy to hear that they have to find a
> company that will sell them a proprietary compiler, just because
> MIPS support was deprecated or dropped from GCC.
> 
> Sounds like the users (Sony?) should be willing to support the continued
> development and maintenance of GCC on MIPS in this case. I see no
> justification for them to be "most unhappy" if they are not providing
> any resources. Alternatively they could provide people to maintain the
> MIPS backend.

Sony has already contributed quite generously to GNU, in the form
of a number of sizeable contracts to Cygnus.  I'm pretty sure Eric
Christopher is not contributing his recent MIPS patches out of pure
generosity.  If FSF GCC were to drop MIPS as a target, then outfits
like Sony would likely just maintain their own GCC fork, as they've
done in the past.  Wouldn't you rather that they apply their resources
to helping with a single version of GCC, rather than a fork?  You
start by not saying to them "the processor you ship by the millions
each year still exists, but just barely."

Stan