dragonegg in FSF gcc?

[Toon Moene]

Weddington, Eric wrote:

>> From: Manuel López-Ibáñez [mailto:lopezibanez@gmail.com] 

>> The fact is that it is (perceived as) more difficult to contribute to
>> GCC than LLVM/Clang for the reasons we all know already.
> 
> From my perspective (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) it is easier for LLVM to do such marketing
> and focus on usability details because they seem to have a central driver to the project,
> whether person/group (founder(s)/champion(s)). GCC is, what I would call, aggressively decentralized;
> Who would do such marketing? Who decides what marketing to do? Who decides the usability details?
> Who would work on it? GCC is the epitome of the saying "If you want something done, do it yourself."
> There is no central authority who can, or will, make a decision about this.
> There is a Steering Committee for GCC, but as they keep saying at the GCC Summits,
> their power and scope is very limited.

Well, it is an open question (at least to me) whether you *want* a 
central driver.

In late 2003, three national laboratories in the US wrote up a position 
paper on their needs in Fortran-land, and lamented the lack of a free 
Fortran compiler (they noted that there was g77, but it wasn't up to 
speed in Fortran-95 land, which they needed).

This was my reply:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/fortran/2003-11/msg00052.html

With that answer, I essentially tossed $ 5 million away (the amount they 
estimated to be needed for a free Fortran 95 compiler, because, in a 
followup mail, I said "Anyway, we will produce a Fortran 95 compiler, 
regardless."

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
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Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html