FreeBSD built with clang now selfhosting - testers wanted

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.current/124678

by durin42 • 16 years ago

87 20 16 years ago

permalink.gmane.org

thristian• 16 years ago

I don't use FreeBSD, and I have no ill-feeling towards the GCC team who have done amazing things for the Free Software community (and lots of other individuals and organisations) over the years — but I'm quite excited to see how much progress Clang has made, and I begin to wonder whether maybe someday the Linux kernel will have two supported compilers.

I hope Clang vs. GCC turns out to be like the Webkit vs. Gecko rivalry - competing in public, but sharing ideas and even code to help improve the state of the art for everybody.

blasdel3• 16 years ago

That analogy is perhaps uncomfortably apt, considering how soundly Webkit is beating Gecko on every front except for self-aggrandizing wankery over hypothetical freedom. The only active non-XUL Gecko application is Camino, the rest died several years ago or switched to webkit, and Camino's been threatening to do one of those too.

GCC was architected by Stallman to be intentionally inextensible, as a means of enforcing their interpretation of the GPL through technical means, by denying access to intermediate representations. That policy has been at least partially reverted 20 years later with the release of 4.5 on Wednesday with some plugin support, now that the LLVM projects are about to eat their lunch.

jrockway• 16 years ago

GCC was architected by Stallman to be intentionally inextensible, as a means of enforcing their interpretation of the GPL through technical means

Yeah, Stallman hates extensible software. Look at Emacs, for example. That thing can't do anything Stallman didn't originally intend.

Try again.

zppx3• 16 years ago

The LGPL adopted by Webkit is much more restrictive than the MPL adopted by gecko (gecko still adopts GPL and LGPL, just because them it can link with GPL software), if you're blaming gecko for supporting Theora but not H.264 I must remember that the WebKit codebase do not includes an H.264 codec, it's Apple and Google that link the codec against webkit, any application that uses the bare WebKit will have to include its own version of the H.264 code, that said technically webkit is advancing much faster than gecko in some areas (WebGL for example).

Concerning gcc, were you reading the mailing list of the gcc project for the last 20 years or so? What you said about Stallman is a fairly serious accusation, and as such must be supported with facts, as far as I know Stallman wasn't even important among gcc developers in the last 10 years, also in the very beginning gcc was intended to be the compiler of the GNU system, the technical reality for compilers in the 80s was probably different from now.

sid03• 16 years ago

> considering how soundly Webkit is beating Gecko on every front

When did WebKit get support for Direct2D?

lambda3• 16 years ago

There is nothing hypothetical about the freedom that Mozilla and GCC are trying to preserve.

NeXT tried to release Objective-C as a proprietary patch to GCC. It was only after the FSF told them that that was in violation of the GPL that they released the source under the GPL, now allowing Objective-C code to run on other platforms (I do in fact know people who deploy production code written in Objective-C on Linux, so this is not at all hypothetical).

Furthermore, NeXT^H^H^H^H Apple is now an even larger threat to computing freedom. They now have several Tivoized devices which forbid you from installing your own software on them unless you agree to an insane license from Apple that prevents you from writing any sort of interpreter or compiler that runs on or even targets those devices (oh, and also forbids political satire, apparently, unless you happen to be a Pulitzer prizewinner and get lots of press out of your rejection). People are talking of using these devices to replace their primary computer; people are even using these things, which are controlled by Apple and can have content remotely wiped from them, for government business. This is most definitely not an issue of "hypothetical" freedom; there are real freedoms being taken by Apple. They have even explicitly stopped upgrading to newer versions of GCC because of fear about the GPLv3; they don't want to make their platforms more free as the GPLv3 would require.

The H.264 issue is not hypothetical either. The licensing system is baroque and risky, as the MPEG-LA reserves the right to change the licensing in the future, meaning products with decoders, encoders, or even content encoded with H.264 may suddenly have massive royalties charged (with only a promise not to change anything for the next couple of years).

zppx3• 16 years ago

I think this will happen in the next 3 years or so, but I think that Linux will support three compilers, gcc, clang and pcc which is being developed by OpenBSD hackers[1].

[1] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2009122823114...

kraemate• 16 years ago

IIRC apple is one of the primary contributors to the Clang project, yes? I wonder what motives they could possibly have for being so interested in compilers. Not to sound like a conspiracy nut, but is it possible that apple could impose a restriction on the iphone apps :"must be compiled with our own version of clang" etc?

LLVM is a great step forward in compilers but it's ties with apple and the recent devious deeds it is capable of is holding me back from contributing to LLVM.

i80and• 16 years ago

They're interested in compilers because, unfortunately, GCC has never really had any emphasis on Objective-C support.

What would be their motivation for restricting down to a single compiler? They had a (silly) reason to lock people into Objective-C; but that reason doesn't apply here. And even if they did, how would that be different from now where GCC is the only option?

lambda3• 16 years ago

I think there are a few issues.

One is that Apple likes control. They could hire the lead LLVM developer, own the copyrights, and use a permissive license, allowing them to exert a lot more control over the project.

Another is that Apple is allergic to the GPLv3. They have stopped upgrading to newer versions of GCC in recent Mac OS X releases, because they are afraid that the GPLv3 may prevent them from Tivoizing the iPhone and iPad.

And back when they were NeXT, they tried to release their Objective-C extensions to GCC as a proprietary patch, but wound up being forced to release them as free software by the GPL. They may want to avoid that sort of thing in the future. For instance, I don't believe they release as free software their implementation of OpenGL which uses LLVM.

So yes, I think it's entirely possible at some point in the future that Apple will say "you must use Clang to compile for the iPhone/iPad platform." And it may even be a special, proprietary version of Clang, targeted at a custom chip in the iPhone or iPad. They have worked very hard to have full control of the platform and toolchain, and made sure that it's all under licenses that will allow them to make it proprietary whenever they wish. They can't quite switch to Clang yet, as its C++ support is not finished yet (though it does cover enough to self-host), but once they do, I absolutely would not be surprised if they mandated its use.

durin42• 16 years ago

Yeah, that objective-c extensions (and objective-c++ even moreso) thing went so well for FSF too. Apple still ships a forked version of GCC (and binutils for that matter) because FSF never actually took all the patches, so I fail to see what good it really did the community, especially now that there's a non-GCC compiler that is open, and has a mainline that supports ObjC.

FreeBSD built with clang now selfhosting - testers wanted

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