Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > > I think it's quite important for gcc's long-term health to permit and > even encourage academic researchers and students to use it. And I see > plugins as directly supporting that goal. Note that I don't see any > problem with requiring (or attempting to require) that any plugin be > covered by the GPL.
Not only this but I'm also more and more concerned about closed source static analysis and code verification tools such as Coverity (http://www.coverity.com/), SLAM (http://research.microsoft.com/slam/) and others (see the list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis). If our concern in the 90's was to build code with an open source compiler, our concern nowadays should be to produce better code inside the open source community... Not having a common open source toolkit to perform *advanced* analysis of code and to build software on it will ends up having an unbalanced quality between proprietary and open source projects in a very unfair manner. We are now only at the beginning of the rise of these tools and yet it makes quite a difference between the code quality of projects using it or not... Having GCC to provide plug-ins would (in my humble opinion) indirectly boost code quality in open source development by allowing better tools to appears and help to fill the gap that started to appear between proprietary and open source code. Moreover, considering the GCC developers point-of-view, it becomes more and more obvious (at least to me) that the next 'frontier' in modern compiler design will be to export features to perform static analysis and verification on code. At last, I would say that I'm more concerned about the number of closed source tools to perform code analysis (with or without the help of GCC) than the hypothetical use of GCC by proprietary softwares because not having this analysis tools will make us loose the race anyway... Well, of course, this is only my very personal point of view on this topic... :) Regards -- Emmanuel Fleury Research is an organized method for keeping you reasonably dissatisfied with what you have. -- Charles Kettering
