RE: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[<Gerald dot Williams at infineon dot com>]

Much as I hate prolonging a probably-pointless discussion...

I hope we aren't thinking about keeping things difficult for
everybody simply because everybody includes some people who
may want to take advantage of GCC in a proprietary way. In
the long term, this only benefits the folks you'd be trying
to exclude.

Think about it. You have nothing to fear from people writing
trivial add-ons (if they're useful, they'll be duplicated in
open source; if not, they'll fade away). The only people you
might need to worry about would be those writing significant
new compiler designs/enhancements using GCC as a starting
point (and possibly trying to get past the GPL by avoiding
direct linking/etc.). Yet as has already been pointed out,
they already can do this by creating their own interface to
plug into. If they use a standard interface (since the code
base would favor this), it would be easier to replace their
plug-ins with open-source alternatives later.

-Jerry