Re: LLVM or GCC or Intel?
Re: LLVM or GCC or Intel?
- Subject: Re: LLVM or GCC or Intel?
- From: Jean-Daniel Dupas <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 09:38:34 +0200
Le 1 août 08 à 09:29, Jonas Maebe a écrit :
On 31 Jul 2008, at 23:53, Jens Alfke wrote:
On 31 Jul '08, at 2:25 PM, Jonas Maebe wrote:
It's really is becoming increasingly harder to support Apple
platforms with a third party compiler, because of the evolution to
more and more lockdowns (moving away from open source/free
software to more something like Microsoft's "shared source"
concept, which is nice as long as you only want to look at things,
but which breaks down horribly very soon if you want to do more).
While I agree with you about the larger-scale issues of NDA
madness, it has nothing to do with compiler technology. LLVM is
fully open source, released under the NCSA license <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php
>.
That license explicitly allows Apple to make modifications to the
LLVM they distribute with a future iPhone/iTablet/... SDK and not to
open source those modifications.
There are obviously many points of view on how software should be
distributed; I don't feel that software licenses should be used (as
by the FSF) as political crowbars to attempt to force 3rd parties
into adopting (or not adopting) particular mechanisms. While I
think Apple is overusing the iPhone NDA in an embarrassingly self-
destructive way, I do defend their right to choose how to make
their software available.
Yes, that's what I'm saying: the LLVM license enables the lawyers to
overuse NDAs in even more embarrassingly destructive ways. The GPL
at least holds back some of the madness, regardless of how you may
feel about it in general (but it is actually the whole point of the
GPL: keep the information freely available and reusable by anyone,
although this indeed curtails personal/corporate freedom to do what
you want in a number of situations).
FWIW: I do not hold a grudge against closed source/proprietary
software in principle, nor do I think that all software should be
open source or free software. I'm just talking about the specific
case of providing enough information and legal means for third
parties to produce compilers for Apple platforms (and I know I have
no natural nor legal right to demand this and I don't, but come
on...).
Ironicaly, their is no easier way to create a new compiler for OS X
than with LLVM. One of it's purpose is to provide an unified way to
produce binary. If you want to create a new OS X compiler, you would
just have to use LLVM libraries, either the free online version, or
the potential "close with secret features not redistributed" version
include with the OS.
Ho yes, if Apple release a closed version that is required to produce
OS X binaries, you would not be able to reinvent the wheel and create
your own llvm byte code to machine code converter. But honestly,
nobody care about this.
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