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Re: java bytecode considered bad
- To: Michael Matz <matzmich at cs dot tu-berlin dot de>
- Subject: Re: java bytecode considered bad
- From: Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at>
- Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 08:20:32 +0100 (CET)
- cc: Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs dot mu dot oz dot au>, Trent Waddington <s337240 at student dot uq dot edu dot au>, <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Michael Matz wrote:
> I think the fear of RMS is more, that people could write a new _backend_
> for their hardware, do not publish it, but still use all the nice
> frontends of GCC. With an intermediate language they could do this
> legally, cause they don't have to link to GCC, but only write a reader for
> that IL.
I believe it would be trivial, for someone (with commercial interests)
who is able to write a backend, to write a simple dumper that saves the
current state of the internal structures/trees to a file or prints it to
a pipe for consumption of a proprietary backend.
Not more than a week of work, probably even much less.
I don't see why we should want to reduce the functionality for users of
GCC to avoid that; unless I miss something, that is.
Gerald
--
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/