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Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?
Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
But as you know, most gcc ports are never contributed anyhow.
Naively, I didn't know that!
I thought most ports were contributed, but some rejected because of code
quality, lack of reviewers, etc....
But does these ports are published elsewhere, in the spirit of GPL, or
are there distributed in a fully proprietary & binary only way (hence
violating the GPL)?
> Ports
that people hire Red Hat to do are contributed, but I can easily count
six gcc ports I've seen myself that were never contributed. So again
I don't see a substantive difference here.
Regarding GCC plugins, and in contrast to some, I still view them as a
big progress (avoiding a make bootstrap is already significant). In
particular, a GCC plugin machinery permit quicker experimentation of new
stuff, and also would perhaps permit inclusion of some specialized code
(like static analysis) which won't fit in the trunk easily. Of course it
is bound by the GPL and should be GPL.
There is one (minor, & insignificant in my opinion) argument against
dynamic plugins: they require a dynamic loading machinery (typically the
libdl, dlopen or equivalent libtldl) which in principle could be
unavailable on some bizarre hosts (but I don't know of anymore such
host) In other words, they require additional features than the
theoretical plain C ANSI compiler.
Regards.
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