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by badsectoracula 595 days ago
LLVM exists because its original developers wanted to do research, not because of GPL and at the time there wasn't even a C compiler for it, not to mention that GCC wasn't designed at all to do what LLVM did.

The license angle with Apple did happen because of GCC's switch to GPLv3 but that came years later - and GCC still wasn't (and AFAIK still isn't) designed to be used like LLVM or (later) Clang, like using it as a backend for IDEs, analyzers, language servers, etc. The two projects aren't interchangeable with only the license being the thing that differentiates them.
1 comments
f1shy 595 days ago
They could have very well used lots or reusable parts of GCC. It was possible, and were many projects trying to change GCC.
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baq 595 days ago
gcc was specifically designed to not have many reusable parts to avoid people ripping them out. modularity only happened after LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch.
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Y_Y 595 days ago
> LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch

I don't know how you can eat GCC's lunch. I feel like in this analogy GCC eats from a communal trough and is very happy to share. A company that sells licenses can lose customers, the GNU project just wants the world to benefit. GCC is still ubiquitous and has plenty of developers and mindshare, what more could they want?

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pjmlp 595 days ago
Basically most of the embedded folks that used GCC forks are now on clang, and if in the old days they were breaching GPL, nowadays they are fully compilant, so not upstreaming is not even a legal issue any longer.
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Y_Y 595 days ago
Fair enough. I guess you're talking about microcontrollers rather than lightweight CPUs, at least in my experience it's still standard to use GCC on the sort of dinky ARM-based devices my company produces.

I'll note that GPL never says anything about upstreaming. It can certainly make life easier if you want to keep your patches up to date and hand off maintenance responsibility, but it suffices to make a written offer of source code under the same license (on a conventional medium) to your customers to comply with any GPL version. You're never obliged to upstream or even publish your code.

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pjmlp 595 days ago
Sure, but they didn't even do that most of the time, with MIT that isn't even part of the conversation.
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f1shy 595 days ago
Most certainly not. The modularity was not great, but BIG chunks of code could be copied. I did that myself.
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