Ian Lance Taylor writes: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Richard Kenner) writes: > > > > 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. > > We can make it as technically hard as possible, but it's way too late > to make it technically hard. In fact, it's easy. You have to write > some code to translate from tree to your proprietary IR, and then you > have to plug that code into passes.c. Sure, but you then have to maintain your port forever, and there is a substantial cost to this. I am pretty sure that if there were a stable API to get trees out of GCC, people would have bolted gcc into proprietary compilers. As there isn't a stable way to do it, it's easier not to do it that way, and instead to contribute to gcc. > If gcc supports plugins, then all we've eliminated is the need to > plug that code into passes.c. But that is the easiest part of the > job. Adding plugins is not going to require us to support a stable > tree interface or anything along those lines; if it did, I would > oppose that. Ahhhhhh. I don't know about that: once we have a plugin infrastructure, we have to document it and there will be pressure to stabilize it. I don't believe that an unstable plugin architecture has any viability at all. > So this seems to me to be a very weak argument against plugins. > Adding plugins does not make it noticeably easier to integrate gcc's > frontend with a proprietary compiler. And adding plugins would not > change the issue of whether such a combination violated the GPL. > > Do you disagree with this assessment? I think there is a real possibility that, had we had such a plugin interface years ago, some of the gcc back-ends and optimization work we have would never have been paid for by some companies, and so gcc would be a worse compiler. Andrew. -- Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, UK Registered in England and Wales No. 3798903
