> that allowed LLVM to swoop in and be a legitimately more useful (if not "better") compiler.

Interestingly enough, if Stallman didn't miss the email[1], LLVM was intended by Latner to be given to the FSF[2]. So yes RMS did commit a management mistake, but it's not the one you think.

> The patch I'm working on is GPL licensed and copyright will be assigned to the FSF under the standard Apple copyright assignment. Initially, I intend to link the LLVM libraries in from the existing LLVM distribution, mainly to simplify my work. This code is licensed under a BSD-like license [8], and LLVM itself will not initially be assigned to the FSF. If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... [2] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

Yes but didn't he later submit the patches and they were rejected anyways?

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

> Stallman himself was largely responsible for GCC not exposing intermediate representation for analysis.

This is wildly offtopic for this thread, but it is not clear that Stallman's stance on this issue was an error. The wide existence of LLVM-based compilers for proprietary architectures is, for many of us, a tragedy that Stallman correctly anticipated. His insightful and courageous steering of the GCC development was a crucial step in avoiding this problem for GCC.

I definitely believe that for the first N years of gcc the policy was absolutely necessary to drag vendors into actually contributing back.

Whether that's still true in terms of the trade-offs being worth it to maintain the policy in the current day, and if it's no longer true what value of N accurately describes when that changed, is something that I think people can reasonably disagree about.

(my extremely boring take being "there's so many counterfactuals here I'm really not sure")

At the expense of forcing people that would love to use GCC to produce open-source tools and research, into using LLVM.

See the email thread I linked for several such examples.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

Most compiler research and tooling development now happens in the LLVM ecosystem, precisely because they dragged their feet for so long.

Isn't it also precluding several non proprietary compilers as well though? In turn making LLVM more popular and making it even more appealing to propriety compiler authors.

GCC is a great C compiler and most of us are happy to keep it that way. The constant drumbeat of 'different different different' is not something I'm interested in. That I can compile C code written before I was born is more than I can ask for. In the same period a dozen safe languages have come and gone with no one even thinking about them any more.