On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 06:19:27 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I wish LLVM would switch to the Boost license, in particular
removing this clause:
"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
disclaimers in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution."
Reading it adversely means if I write a simple utility and
include a few lines from LLVM, I have to include that license
in the binary and a means to print it out. If I include a bit
of code from several places, each with their own version of
that license, there's just a bunch of crap to deal with to be
in compliance.
Hi Walter,
I recall there was a thread in the LLVM mailing list last year
about moving to a different license. So maybe that is on the
cards, and the D community could chip on that conversation.
I feel that by moving an LLVM backend D will gain the help /
expertise of a large number of companies that are working on LLVM
including Microsoft & Google. Isn't Clang's claim that it is much
faster than gcc when it comes to compiling? So maybe the speed of
compilation using LLVM is not such an issue as presumably a lot
of the cost in C++ compilation is in the front-end and with D the
same issues won't arise?
In any case with scarce resources it seems wasteful to have
people working on multiple backends - it would make more sense to
converge to one backend - and LLVM being non-GPL and having a lot
of momentum may be the best option.
I also feel that a lot of the C++ interfacing could be done by
using the Clang libraries - again for similar reasons that you
will gain from work already being done.
Regards
Dibyendu
