But free compilers won so quickly even when they weren't obviously better that many proprietary compilers died quick, unceremonious deaths, with no obvious successors, and leading their authors to go into different areas. This was a bad thing, in my opinion, because a lot of early compilers were written in incredibly clever ways, and those clever ways died with them.
I think my comment was also worded poorly:
> I appreciate
> that free software "won" to some extent
is how I was hoping it would be interpreted, but I think it was interpreted as:
> I appreciate
> to some extent
> that free software "won"
Free software winning was absolutely the right thing, I just wish it would have been a bit less sudden.
Intel Fortran compiler and their C++ compiler produce the fastest code. Lucid Energize and IBM VisualAge C++ did incremental compilation and had IDE features not available with Free Software C++ compilers and editors/debuggers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk http://www.edm2.com/index.php/VisualAge_C++_4.0_Review
It's not exactly hidden knowledge that the Intel compilers produce the best code, it's just that they have draconian licensing requirements. Furthermore, that knowledge cannot possibly be lost, because they're still actively developed to this day. I'm interested in the technological specifics of what these older platforms did that the newer ones cannot do, and why the knowledge of how to do them has been lost.
I was recently listening to the 2007 "Copyleft Capitalism: GPLv3 & the Future of Software Innovation" talk¹ by Eben Moglen (who incidentally happened to have worked on IBM's APL interpreter), and he makes the opposite argument: it was the source code hoarding of the Microsoft-driven personal computer industry that was the biggest impediment to knowledge transfer and innovation.
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68aimESyyeU