Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life
by a3_nm on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:12AM
(#8989594)
> compromised by RMS' desire to keep it tightly coupled for licensing reasons
It's certainly better to have an intermediate language and a modular design to compile to it and from it, but I thought this was introduced by LLVM and not gcc because (1.) compiler performance mattered more at the time, so it was better to couple everything to save some performance with dirty tricks, and (2.) people just hadn't realized that this was the right design. (The same way that it took time for the relational database abstraction to come around and replace the tendency for each program to use its custom internal database.)
Is there any specific reason to believe that gcc's design was influenced by licensing reasons?
It's certainly better to have an intermediate language and a modular design to compile to it and from it, but I thought this was introduced by LLVM and not gcc because (1.) compiler performance mattered more at the time, so it was better to couple everything to save some performance with dirty tricks, and (2.) people just hadn't realized that this was the right design. (The same way that it took time for the relational database abstraction to come around and replace the tendency for each program to use its custom internal database.)
Is there any specific reason to believe that gcc's design was influenced by licensing reasons?