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by CHY872
4063 days ago
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That's my entire point; if Clang did not exist then Apple would have had to contribute the Swift frontend back with the GPL or write an entire compiler backend, as they did for Obj-C. Now, Clang is competitive and they can keep the frontend under wraps. Had Clang existed when Apple were implementing Obj-C, they'd have used that, there'd be no open source Obj-C frontend Microsoft wouldn't be able to do this without considerably more work. |
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Ah, OK... So you mean if NeXT hadn't based their 1980s effort on GCC, i.e. if there had been a decent BSD-licensed C compiler back then.
It's worth mentioning that this was a long time ago, before a fair number of HN readers were born, and also at a time when GPL vs. BSD licensing likely wasn't as much of a topic as today. Comparing GCC with Clang when we're talking about things that happened in 1988[1] just doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
[1] Per Wikipedia's article on Objective-C, the year that NeXT's GCC changes happened.