Hacker News Reader

Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

I’m hopeful open sourcing means a new life for EDG.

Where would that new life come from? As far as I am aware, there isn't exactly a thriving community around it which has been begging for a source release for ages, and with Clang and GCC there hasn't been a shortage of open-source C++ compilers either. And it's not exactly like the C++ ecosystem as a whole is booming, with it not having any answer to the memory safety problem.

From what I can tell this is just some retiring guys who want to make sure their life's work isn't lost to history, and who want to avoid screwing over their handful of remaining customers. Realistically, the best you can hope for is probably the occasional bugfix, and other open-source compilers scavenging it for a handful of useful clever ideas.

Maybe they're hoping the remaining customers will cooperate on keeping it up to speed? I know that f.ex. IAR are building their own backends,etc and might be an EDG customer, the MSVC IDE team aswell, now if they'll manage to get it working is another question but with the code in the open there's a chance at least.

Why not defect to clang? I'm sure some PHB's will suggest that (and that will be part of the survival, convincing those that supporting another party is a good thing).

Standardization does have it's issues, but the JS ecosystem always seems to be healthier when one implementation isn't too dominant. The question is if the C++ ecosystem is large enough to support multiple frontends.

The thing is, who's going to pull the cart? Giving stewardship to a nonprofit is perfectly fine from an IP perspective, and they'll have no trouble finding someone to herd some bugfixes, but what's going to happen when significant refactoring is needed to add support for C++26/29/etc?

Having your resident compiler expert upstream the occasional patch to keep your legacy product from dying is one thing, but which big tech company cares about this specific compiler enough to spin up an entirely new dedicated team for it? And who's going to choose a mostly-abandoned compiler front-end as a core part of a new product?

Sure, it can be done, but for each individual user defecting to clang must be looking very attractive right now.

Wouldn't it be Microsoft, since they rely on it for IntelliSense?

There are fundamental differences in the design of clang and EDG at IR level that would affect whether clang can work for your use cases at all. I don't know enough in this area, so I won't say anything incorrect that would embarrass myself, but that's something you could look into.

I estimate there were very roughly 50 customers in the end. (I was an EDG engineer and didn't work on admin stuff — so it might be off, but not much. I'm estimating based on support tickets origins.) That's down from maybe double that at our max (again, my estimate). I heard of fairly few customers switching to Clang or other projects (Intel being the most notable exception). Most of our customers we "lost" were due to mergers/acquisitions (i.e., two customers suddenly became just one).

This. Maintaining a C++ front end is a lot of hard work that requires expertise -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are a bunch of CS PhDs in the team. You don't just randomly hire someone to work on compilers like with web development. I seriously doubt there will be a lot of contributions coming from the community. Maybe bug fixes, but likely not keeping up with C++ standards.

C++ is a sprawling language which will consume any available amount of effort or goodwill. So I don't expect you will see a "new life" for this codebase while continued effort on the "big three" compilers happens.

Well, Microsoft has to finally fix Visual Studio and VSCode Intelisense experience with modules some day.

Now if they upstream the changes is another matter.

I wouldn’t hold my breath, but I hope I am wrong

Reply on news.ycombinator.com