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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

> As a little side note; with the recent release of LLVM 3.7, if we specify -target x86_64-scei-ps4 to clang, we can compile code with the exact same options that Sony uses to compile official code for the PS4.

I wonder if this will undermine the opensource strategy of Sony's LLVM/SDK team. I hope not.

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Reason why Sony open source their version of LLVM is to make it easier (cheaper) to maintain it. So it's commercial interest and it's unlikely to change because it's wouldn't affect how soon it's going to be hacked at that point anyway.

It's just like with previous "Linux on PS3" that was mainly done by Sony to decrease taxes as they could pay less if their system can be considered as general purpose PC and not just gaming console. On the time that feature was removed this trick just didn't make sense anymore.

Essentially this. There was a talk by Sony at the 2013 LLVM Developers' Meeting: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/#talk8

From the slides:

Initial development hampered by secrecy

- Blanket secrecy policy included compiler project

- No advice/feedback from the group consciousness

- Sitting on features and bugs and fixes applicable upstream

Clear value to working openly with upstream

- File a bug; somebody else might fix it

- Send a patch; people will review/advise

- Bigger features can get better design review

- Putting private changes upstream reduces merge pain

And:

Merging once per upstream release was a nightmare

- We stuck our fingers in everywhere

- The 3.0 merge work took three months

You know that and we know that here. I just feared someone might decide that making engineers miserable to do the constant porting might be a good security tradeoff.

Sony just lost their top LLVM open source proponent to Apple. Read into that what you will.

Who's that?

Alex Rosenberg - https://twitter.com/alexr

His bio reads "day: console OS development, night: home".

Time for wild speculation! Apple are making a game console!

(He probably just hasn't updated the bio.)

Aren't they already the manufacturers of the most popular game console, namely, the iPhone? :)

old bio.

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