But speaking seriously, we Appleites deal with corporate pressure
to support various hacks by maintaining our own version of GCC and
taking on all the costs that go with that, so I'm wondering why it
is that HP can't do the same. While I personally don't have a problem
doing a little favor for HP, it's going to be really tricky to avoid
charges of favoritism and bias later on if, say, some Apple feature is
shot down.
I have to agree that this is very slippery slope. What stops from
extend this to programming models like the AltiVec PIM. Currently GCC
supports its own variant of the PIM while all other compilers that
implement the specified PIM.