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by woodruffw 858 days ago
I'm not sure this is a reasonable framing: LLVM stole much of GCC's thunder by being significantly easier to contribute to (and extend externally), but I don't think it would be accurate to say that LLVM is "discouraging" people from contributing to GCC.
3 comments
anze3db 858 days ago
I'm not sure if you can compare a project that came out of a university and got adopted by Apple with a project developed by a VC backed company with no revenue. I'm sure Charlie has the best intentions with both ruff and uv, but we have no idea how this is going to play out.
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woodruffw 858 days ago
My understanding of Ruff's history is that it predates Astral, and was originally a side project by Charlie. I have similar reservations about VC funding and sustainability, but I don't think Ruff was created as a trojan horse or with a secret takeover plan in mind.

I agree that we have no idea how it'll play out. But I've seen nothing but good faith from Charlie and others, and I see no reason to preemptively condemn their attempt to build a business.

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marwis 858 days ago
LLVM was at least written in the same language it is compiling.

In this case they are replacing Python code with Rust which might exclude large part of Python community from being able to contribute.

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woodruffw 858 days ago
By this token, we should be concerned that CPython is not written in Python. But that historically has not posed a significant risk to CPython's longevity, nor to the ability of motivated contributors to learn the C necessary to contribute to it.

(Or another framing: only the tiniest fraction of the Python community was contributing to CQA tooling in the first place. It's not clear that prioritizing the interests of the 99.9% of Python programmers who -- rightfully! -- will never modify these tools makes sense.)

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ForHackernews 858 days ago
The slow death of GCC has been unquestionably bad for copyleft software.
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woodruffw 858 days ago
Why is it LLVM's job to be good for copyleft software?
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ForHackernews 858 days ago
It's not. But some suspicion of successor projects is probably warranted by the devs and users of existing tools.
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