Re: Notes from the GROW'10 workshop panel (GCC research opportunities workshop)

[Nathan Froyd <froydnj@codesourcery.com>]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 09:49:08PM +0200, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
> Toon Moene wrote:
>>
>> Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for GCC: There might be too many 
>> hurdles to use GCC in academia.  
>
> This is probably true, however, the plugin ability of the just released  
> GCC 4.5 (or is it released tomorrow) helps probably significantly.
>
> Academics (even people working in technological research institutes like  
> me) will probably be more able to practically contribute to GCC thru the  
> plugin interface. It brings two minor points: a somehow defined plugin  
> API (which is a sane "bottleneck" to the enormity of GCC code), and the  
> ability to practically publish code without transfering copyright to FSF  
> (in the previous situation, the only way to avoid that was to create a  
> specific GPLv3 fork of GCC; in practice it is too expensive in labor for  
> academia).

I appreciate the point about the difficulty of copyright transference in
an academic environment, having gone through such difficulties myself.
But I think you are confusing "using GCC as a base for your research
activities" and "getting the results of that research accepted
upstream".  I think plugins help in the first category insofar as they
force GCC to clearly define interface boundaries.  But they have little
effect concerning the second category.

Perhaps people will be able to make their code more widely available:
the plugin interface will likely be relatively stable (I realize this is
not guaranteed) and people can therefore release easily compilable
packages.  Before, you would be forced to distribute (and maintain!)
patch files that may need significant changes from release to release.

-Nathan