On 4/9/21 1:48 PM, Pankaj Jangid wrote:
Gabriel Ravier via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> writes:
RMS is not indispensible because he does not contribute to GCC and
doesn't bring much to it, and otherwise takes more away from it. If
you were to remove all of Ian, Jonathan, Joseph and Nathan you would
be removing ~13% of active contribution to GCC (counting in
commits). If you also remove all the major contributors that are from
corporations (counting a major contributor as someone with 10 or more
commits), you're removing ~63% of active contribution. If you also
remove the major organizations contributing to GCC, like Adacore and
the GDC project, you're removing ~18% more of active contribution,
meaning you're left with 19% of active contribution. While I do not
doubt that all of the contributors that would remain are talented
individuals, GCC would undoubtedly, in the best case, heavily suffer
from the loss of 3 to 4 fifths of active contribution and become much
less appealing as a compiler, and in the worst case simply die
out. While each of the individuals forming any of those groups aren't
indispensable, as a group, they certainly are indispensible to GCC
unless you think GCC can really survive with 3/5 times less
contributions to it.
What is this man? Are you trying to compute the probability of survival
a project? You forgot to count me. I am one of the users of GCC. If
there are no users then the project is dead; however heavyweight the
maintainers are.
And let me also tell you the truth. I have looked at the list of
maintainers and the steering committee for the first time, when this
thread was started. My reason for sticking to GCC is FSF and associated
cause. Not the above list of people. Those who are not connected with
the cause have already started migrating to the competing tools.
If you have an enormous exodus of maintainers that takes away 4 fifths
of maintainers, then there is a very high probability that the project
will simply die by essentially all measures except for such asinine ones
as "there is still at least 1 user of it" (under which, say, Version 6
UNIX is not dead as there are still computers running it and people
using it), as a GCC with much less people maintaining it would, over
time, become very unattractive as a tool for actually making programs,
as progress on developing it would become very slow. It would, for
example, lose any C++ users that want to use anything beyond C++17 or
the partial support for C++20 that GCC has right now.
While I am not saying that the amount of maintainers is directly tied to
the survival of a project, I would certainly say that a project with
near to no maintainers without which it cannot compete with competing
projects (for example, Clang) /will/ die off.
The only ones that would remain would be those that would use GCC
despite its enormous shortcomings for the single and only reason that it
is licensed under the GPL, and those would be rather rare compared to
the amount of people that use GCC right now. I am not saying that they
are just a few dozen people or something like that, but GCC would become
a shadow of its former self without any other support.
I would say that under those circumstances GCC would become about as
popular as Turbo C or other antiquated tools like it, and I would
certainly hope one would consider Turbo C to be a dead compiler, despite
the fact that it still has at least 1 active user. While I don't think
this outcome is likely, it would become likely if every single
corporation and organization involved in the development of GCC suddenly
retracted support for it. Do you really think GCC could remain
competitive compared to compilers like Clang or MSVC if development on
it was 5 times as slow, and if distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu
started to migrate to LLVM, or even maybe straight up removed GCC from
their repositories ?
PS: Of course, this is completely implausible, and it is almost certain
that this will never happen, but you're implying that GCC can perfectly
survive without any support from corporations: I am simply telling you
what would happen if all those corporations actually stopped to support it
