On 29 Feb 2008, at 16:46, Pete French wrote:
Do you really think that the LLVM license is a good license for our
compiler / runtime language library ? ;-)
Lisence wars are never very productive and the UNIX/BSD vs the Linux/
GNU
style has been runnign for years. The thing is, wouldn't it be nice to
have it so GNUstep worked with both ? I really like the sound of this
compiler (it's a new toy if nothing else) and I also like the sound of
the new runtime. But that doesn't mean a switch from GCC surely ?
Choice
is a good thing...
Or to put it another way, I don't think we should be including a
compiler
or runtime *at* *all* as part of GNustep - it should be "choose your
Objective-C compiler" as then it gets on with it. Possibly easier
said than done though :-)
I composed a long reply to Nicola's email, but this makes my point far
better than I did. A few things:
- LLVM is Free Software.
- LLVM is already producing faster code than GCC.
- LLVM code is clean enough that I can go from first looking at it to
submitting patches in a few days, while the GCC code is indecipherable
to anyone not already intimately familiar with it.
- LLVM has a JIT mode which will (when combined with a runtime library
like mine - and unlike the Apple and GNU ones - which allows safe
lookup caching) allow dynamic inlining,
Not supporting LLVM would, in my view, be a mistake. I am obviously
horrendously biassed when it comes to supporting my runtime (if I
didn't think supporting it was a good idea, I wouldn't have written it
in the first place).
GNUstep already includes code to support the NeXT runtime, which isn't
Free Software at all. Supporting a compiler that is seems like a
logical thing to do. With OS X 10.6, people are likely to be writing
Cocoa programs with LLVM. If we want them to port their code to
GNUstep, then supporting their compiler seems like a sensible thing to
do, ignoring some of the shiny things that LLVM would let us do (OS
and architecture agnostic .app bundles spring to mind).
David
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