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

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net>]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:26:16AM +0200, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote:
> On 14 April 2010 23:34, Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net> wrote:
> >
> > And my personal preference on GCC licensing would be more a Linux-kernel
> > like GPL with copyright belonging to authors employee (I don't feel a SCO
> > like issue as a major threat today; it might have been ten years ago). That
> > is much easier to get than a copyright transfer to FSF.
> 
> I am sorry but I do not think the copyright transfer/ GCC license is
> worth discussing in this list. 

Then sorry for having discussed it. It was only my personal option.
Discussion closed.

> 
> And given the feedback provided by Grigori, the licensing issues are
> very low in the list of complains from academia and the major
> complaints are technical (speed, simplicity, and documentation).
> 
> > And GCC is probably less threatened today by legal issues Ä… la SCO than by
> > obesity, obsolescence, outside competition -eg LLVM- and perhaps even less
> > interest by industry for the low level languages (C, C++, Ada) GCC is
> > processing. Even in industry, scripting languages (or languages like Java or
> > C# which are not practically significant for GCC) have more market share
> > than a dozen years ago.
> 
> You know there is a Java FE in GCC, don't you?


Of course I do know about gcj. But I never met any person using it, and I
don't know about any person or project really using it (as an example, I am
not sure than any Debian or Fedora package is compiled with gcj into a
native executable; do you know of many Debian packages compiled with GCJ
specifically?). But I don't know much about Java (except practically Sun's
JVM, IBM's one, and OpenJdk).

> 
> And whether a language is significant or not for GCC is a question of
> someone contributing a FE for it. 

I did not meant significant for GCC, I did meant significant for industrial
use (outside of the GCC community). What I just believe is that programming
languages usually compiled by GCC are a bit less used than ten years ago (in
favor of scripting languages such as PHP). And it is the industrial
importance of languages which I believe determine indirectly the work on GCC
(because industrials are funding directly or indirectly, or at least are
lobbying for, most of the labor put into GCC)

> And calling Ada "low-level"... Honestly, let's stop this sub-thread
> here. No more discussion about plugins or legal issues, please.


Ok. Sorry for the inconvenience.

(BTW I call lowlevel any language which does not manage memory
automatically; I am quite fond of Ocaml even if I don't use it much today.
So in my eyes C++, Ada95 & Fortran2005 are still low-level; this is only a
matter of taste & terminology).

Cheers

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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