Re: GPL and loading/saving RTL (was: Beginner's question:Are thereany inter-procedural optimizationin GCC backend ?)

[<tm_gccmail at kloo dot net>]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Joe Buck wrote:
>
> RMS likes to point to the existence of GNU C++ and GNU Objective-C.  Both
> were developed by people whose employers initially sought ways of making
> them proprietary.  Had there been a method to dump and read trees or RTL
> from files, Mike Tiemann's initial g++, and NeXT's original Objective-C
> compiler, might have been proprietary software.  Certainly their lawyers
> tried to figure out ways of doing this (at one time NeXT was going to use
> a script that downloaded the FSF gcc, patched it, and built it for the
> user), but gave up and ended up assigning the code to the FSF.  So, RMS
> would argue that keeping GCC non-modular has served users by leveraging
> more free software.
> 
> However, it's clear to me that the FSF is going to have to open up.  If
> we can't get more information into and out of the compiler, we are limited
> in our ability to do interprocedural optimization, and it's difficult to
> write integrated development environments that understand code structure.

Personally, I think it's a moot point, as it's likely the intermediate
format would change slightly every release, and the vendors would need to
play "version catchup" and in some cases need to support multiple versions
simultaneously, and in the end they would probably give up.

This is assuming GCC releases occur fairly frequently, though.

Toshi