No GPL Apps for Apple's App Store

Re:No GPL Apps for Apple's App Store by brisance on Saturday January 08, 2011 @11:16PM (#2084784)

  4) I'm sorry, but this has been my impression as a toolchain integrator and distribution vendor. LLVM, which only even supports two platforms (although having seriously broken semi-support for ARM) is often stated to be "catching up" in correctness to gcc, but is not there yet. The opinion that LLVM is somehow epic is something you only hear from incredibly pro-Apple developers. I mean, even Apple's port of gcc explicitly chooses incorrect results occasionally for performance (an interesting specific case being ___divdc3).

In order to keep their user-base on Actionscript/Flash, Adobe was banking on LLVM to get Flash to work on iOS devices before they were legally restricted from doing so. With the lifting of the ban, Adobe can now deploy Flash-based code on iOS devices[1]. LLVM is also used in many other commercial software project, so your argument doesn't hold.

[1] http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html

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Re:No GPL Apps for Apple's App Store by saurik on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @09:15AM (#2096170)

Compilers can be surprisingly "incorrect" and yet still be usable in production. I've routinely been forced to work with compilers that generated incorrect code in numerous situations, and I've simply cataloged and avoided them.

(Interestingly enough, the compiler in question that generated incorrect code so often that I had a catalog ruleset of "things not to do" was llvm-gcc, when I was first deploying Cydia and Telesphoreo to the jailbroken iPhone community. However, that was a while ago, and LLVM doesn't have those shockingly bad issues anymore.)

(It was just a few weeks ago, though, when chpwn started trying to get Cydia compiling with LLVM and kept getting "internal compiler error" on what seemed like some reasonably simple C++.)

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