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Comment by pepijndevos | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance, but who is buying proprietary language interpreters/compilers these days?

What are some other successful examples of this? I remember ChezScheme became free recently.

I avoid closed-source tools as much as possible. But sometimes they happen to be the most performant choice. I've seen the claim that the Dyalog APL is the fastest, for example. Commercial compilers from chip manufacturers (Intel, e.g.) are popular for numerical applications, as the free alternatives, excellent as they are, simply can not make the detailed optimizations that the targeted compilers can. The chip makers invest in developing these compilers because they make their systems look fast on benchmarks.

Commercial compilers from chip manufacturers are common in embedded world - from Keil and IAR for ARM (you can use GCC but the code quality wouldn't be that good) to almost everything proprietary down the road to FPGA and ASIC.

> (you can use GCC but the code quality wouldn't be that good)

Maybe.. on the other hand you can actually use the full program space available, and gdb. (Last time I used Keil was 2011, I quickly moved to a GCC toolchain rather than pay for a license. They're really not selling me on their tool when they arbitrarily restrict my max program size such that I can't actually evaluate it properly.)

I have an FPGA toolchain installed, and it sucks. It's free spyware though.

Mathematica, MATLAB, plenty of succesful vendors in this space, someone must be... I would guess people doing real actual work, rather than chasing the latest JS framework...

MATLAB, Mathematica, Maple, Labview, IDL, wasn't there an article here that R just recently passed S+? Turns out scientists and engineers are still willing to pay for tools.

Oh yea. I actually have 3 of those installed since my university has free student licenses. I'd never have considered buying them, but maybe after several years of use, I can imagine my future employer paying for it.

I hate Labview with a passion(needed for data acquisition in labs), I barely use Mathematica, and I'd be fine with using Scipy over Matlab, but Matlab is actually nice for quickly doing some analysis and graphs.

Have you tried Octave?

> Turns out scientists and engineers are still willing to pay for tools.

Free software != Gratis software.

LispWorks, AllegroLisp, Intel C, C++, Fortran compilers

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