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by lazyjones 4538 days ago
> GCC is written poorly on purpose in order to make it difficult to work with gcc

That's a strange conspiracy theory that has been posted here several times and debunked as well. It seems particularly odd to me because when I worked at a university 15 years ago, everyone in the compiler research world would occasionally hack on gcc to add features, retarget it, add optimizations etc. ... It didn't seem prohibitively difficult.
2 comments
anon1385 4538 days ago
It's not a conspiracy theory. Could you point to the 'debunking' because I don't see one that contains any actual evidence?. There are lots and lots of public mailing list posts by RMS and other GCC engineers explaining their reasoning for not making GCC more modular. The reasons were political.

For example RMS vetoed the first attempts to add support for Java bytecode to GCC because he thought it would allow people to interact with GCC from other non-free software: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html

That same reasoning is why there is no GCC equivalent to LLVM IR or libclang or libtooling.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-12/msg00...

Part of the reason why clang/llvm weakens our commnity, compared with GCC, is that the clang front ends can feed their data to nonfree tools.

There are some links in this wiki page that cover some of the arguments made against adding support for plugins to GCC. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCC_Plugins under 'Potential disadvantages of supporting a plugin architecture in GCC'

Here is a post from a GCC maintainer explaining that RMS was personally blocking the inclusion of this much desired basic functionality for political reasons: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2007-11/msg00193.html

> Is there any progress in the gcc-plugin project ?

Non-technical holdups. RMS is worried that this will make it too easy to integrate proprietary code directly with GCC.

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lazyjones 4537 days ago
Are posts from 2001 and 2007 really relevant for this discussion?

Look at this for example: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00182.html

The "debunking" in this thread was the confirmation that plugins actually work now because the policies were relaxed in favor of them.

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anon1385 4537 days ago
The Stallman post about LLVM being bad because it allows people to use it to build other tools was from 2012. Why did you ignore that?

Plugins are only part of the story. Without stable intermedia representations there is still no GCC equivalent to libtooling or LLVM IR. That is by design, and remains true.

No conspiracy theory. Just an ugly truth that some people want to deny.

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asdasf 4538 days ago
Why would you post an outright lie like that? Anyone can read the discussion and see multiple mailing list postings from RMS himself confirming the "conspiracy theory" is in fact reality. Quite an odd concept of debunking.
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