> I have a different fear: that gcc will become increasing irrelevant, > as more and more new programmers learn to work on alternative free > compilers instead. That is neutral with regard to freedom, but it > will tend to lose the many years of experience which have been put > into gcc. In my view, if we can't even get ourselves together to > permit something as simple as plugins with an unstable API, then we > deserve to lose.
As was said before, the difficultly in people working with GCC is primarily lack of adequate documentation. Creating a "plugin" interface is certainly much more fun than writing documentation, but doesn't help this issue nearly as much. Moreover, writing documentation is not a potential legal threat while plugins are. To me, that argues strongly against plugins and in favor of much more documentation.
