Using of parse tree externally

[Robert Dewar]

<<I said that people are going to take other, proprietary front-ends,
teach them about GCC extensions/quirks/bugs, and hook them up to
proprietary back-ends/tools.

The impact of this is that proprietary tools vendors will have access
to tools that present easy-to-use representations of a program written
in GNU C.
>>

OK, well that's something quite different, and is perfectly legitimate
competition. A little competition is not necessarily a bad thing :-)

One example of a possible move in this direction is Wind River, which
is giving signs of moving away from gcc, in the direction of proprietary
compilers and tools (of course their flagship product, VxWorks is already
and always has been, proprietary).