Re:Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC
by hga on Monday January 19, 2015 @11:54AM
(#8912710)
Indeed, but that route requires forking GNU Emacs and earning RMS's eternal hostility, along with his fanbois and girls. Which I can attest is no fun (I worked for UniPress on the EMACS that he illicitly forked GNU Emacs from, I went from a LMI Lisp Machine ally, and later roommate when he started GNU, to a "Software Hoarder" (note UniPress shipped their Emacs with undistributeble source)). It's a very big thing to split one or more communities like that, a potentially fatal thing, and this discussion has brought out that GNU Emacs is already losing a lot of mind share in the otherwise sort of natural for it C and C++ communities.
One problem here is that RMS is not a C++ programmer (not an entirely unwise decision!), the languages he programs in, to the extent he does anymore, don't require this sort of thing, and apparently doesn't appreciate how this is a deal breaker for modern C++ programming. Or doesn't care, and how that's decreasing GCC mindshare as well.
Because of this policy with GCC, 99.999% plus of the the academic mind share is with LLVM, and the only thing keeping it from taking over is it's relative paucity of backends.
One problem here is that RMS is not a C++ programmer (not an entirely unwise decision!), the languages he programs in, to the extent he does anymore, don't require this sort of thing, and apparently doesn't appreciate how this is a deal breaker for modern C++ programming. Or doesn't care, and how that's decreasing GCC mindshare as well.
Because of this policy with GCC, 99.999% plus of the the academic mind share is with LLVM, and the only thing keeping it from taking over is it's relative paucity of backends.