Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

> I don't believe this is a strong argument.  My contention is, and has 
> always been, that GCC is _already_ trivial to integrate into a 
> proprietary compiler.  There is at least one compiler I know that does this.

I believe that any such compiler would violate the GPL.  But I also believe
it's not in the best interest of the FSF to litigate that matter if the
linkage between the compiler is anything other than linked in a single
executable.  Therefore, I think it's important for us to make it as
technically hard as possible for people to do such a linkage by readin and
writing tree or communicating as different libraries or DLLs.  I'm very
much against any sort of "plug in" precisely for this reason.

> IMO, the benefits we gain in making GCC a more attractive code base, far 
> outweigh the fears of someone co-opting it for their own proprietary uses.

That depends on the importance you attach to the philosophy of free
software.  I suspect RMS attaches much more importance to that than anybody
on this list.