Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Easier said than done, when the codebase seems to be deliberately designed in an obfuscated way due to paranoia around licensing issues. The rest of the GNU toolchain has a similar feel to it too.

As an RE who has looked at a lot of compiler output, the code GCC generates is quite different compared to e.g. MSVC and ICC, and I'm almost willing to bet that it's not by chance. I have attempted to discover where to implement improvements by reading the source, but the whole thing is so complex that it's difficult to understand.

Complexity and licensing are probably the biggest issues that put people off trying to improve GCC.

View on HN

I really doubt that any free software project would intentionally make its code harder to deal with. What would that even accomplish? People ripping off GPL'd code aren't distributing the source, so your obfuscation isn't going to be noticed. The code GCC outputs is irrelevant to licensing; RMS decided very early on that he wasn't going to try to make GCC only compile free software.

Really, I think the GNU toolchain suffers from being an early adopter of internationalization (since RMS was always committed to Unix saying "Hello, world" and not "Hello, America") and as such has a lot of cruft for inserting translated strings into things like cp.

But GCC is also just old. That's far more likely than a GPL conspiracy story.

No, this really is true, RMS wanted to make sure the GCC front ends and back ends could not be seperated, because he didn't want people using the front end for other projects. This has (in my opinion) hugely set back open source software, and is why everyone new uses clang for any situation where they want to parse C++ -- because g++ is purposefully designed to make it painful to just get a C++ parse tree.

Here are the words from the man himself: https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-01/msg00008.html

Your information is old. You can easily access the C++ parse tree by writing a gcc plugin. This is possible since gcc 4.5 or so, but somehow nobody really noticed since everyone just stared at the new kid on the block.

You might say the tree itself isn't easy to deal with, which is true, but that is just because the code is very old and things were done differently back then (hint: union of structs).

There is even a very nice tutorial which explains how to do this:

http://www.codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog/2010/05/03/parsing-...

making two parts not separated does not imply the code is obfuscated. Also, the gcc maintainers have in the meantime moved away from that policy, IIRC.

I can't find it right now, but there's a pretty interesting thread from the GCC mailing lists where RMS states explicitly that parts of GCC are very tightly coupled, by design, precisely to make it hard to reuse the code-generation backend in non-free software.

I believe the rationale is that such a reuse would be very hard to find, much less prove conclusively.

I can't believe this is true, given that the FSF was able to get Apple to release it's Objective-C implementation without even a lawsuit. (For some background, search objective-c on this page: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...)

People or certainly some companies might be put off from contributing due to licensing. That might be. However, it shouldn't be understated that a great number of contributors to GCC do so because of its license.

I don't think that userbinator is complaining about gcc's licence so much as about the unnecessary complexity of the codebase. The accusation that I've heard levelled at gcc in the past is that the code is structured such a way as to make it hard to use parts of it with other proprietary modules. The consequence of this is a codebase that is less modular and more complex than necessary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com