Objective Modula-2 wrote:
So my recommendation would be to actively seek out those universities...
That might work. But it sounds like a lot of hours on the phone, and we engineers and programmers are not the greatest salesmen, in my experience. So your solution may not be practical.
There was a long discussion about the pro and contra of plug-ins some time last year (or even earlier) on the GCC developer mailing list. A great number of commenters actually suggested that the API should regularly be changed at random to break anyone's code on purpose.
Am I understanding you correctly: people writing GPL code are actively trying to make it harder for other people to use their work? If that is true, they are betraying the spirit upon which GPL was founded in the first place: to share one's work and save everyone else a lot of trouble.
Your accusation against the GCC team is a serious one. Can you point me to the GCC forum discussions in question with a web link? Because if what you say is true, then I'm going to have to get away from GCC.
Adriaan van Os wrote:
Doing that is a very difficult and never-ending task, because the back-end will keep changing. It is more time-ineffcient to go another way, e.g. to rewrite the compiler to produce intermediate C++ or (what I would prefer) intermediate LLVM assembly code.
If what OM2 says about GCC is true, then I think it's clear that the GCC team will do their best to make it hard for us to keep up with their changes, and therefore you are right: it's not worth bothering with.
So, this LLVM route is looking attractive. I'll skip looking into GCC for now, and spend a few hours reading here instead:
Yours, Kevan