And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.
Any reference for that claim? This would seem to be an absurd design decision. It's more work to design this way but the benefits are enormous.
Any reference for that claim? This would seem to be an absurd design decision. It's more work to design this way but the benefits are enormous.
I can't find a citation for this at the moment, but RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate into other tools just for the sake of pushing the GPL. For example, this was his explanation for why improvements to GCC's intermediate representation formats (GIMPLE and friends) were refused for a long time.
Weird. Though not as bad as the worst of Microsoft's shenanigans, this strikes me as in the same class of uncivil moves that the FSF complains about proprietary software vendors pulling.
Why? Did you buy a copy of GCC?
We are using two different definitions of "open". Back in the 80's Unix was considered "open" because you could compile a program for various flavors and the various flavors could share data on the same network (contrary to other platforms of the time). GCC is open not because it runs on many platforms, but because you can freely inspect, change it and redistribute it. Those are two completely different meanings.
But if end users are hacking stuff, then they are also developers. Replace "end users" with "developers" and it gets interesting:
"So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that developers aren't allowed to hack is bad."
So making it hard to hack X for people trying to make Y hard to hack is okay. Seems a bit weird.