Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
NightStrike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
There is a simple technique which anybody is free to use to make this
happen much faster: make a large donation to the SFLC and/or the FSF,
contingent on this issue being finished. In the absence of that, it
will happen in the time that people have available to work on it.
How large is large?
More than you want to pay personally. Think: enough to hire another
staff member to work on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying it won't get done. It will get done. But
it is in effect like any other volunteer job. Our position with
regard to the people who need to do the work is like a gcc user's
position with regard to us.
I fully understand that position, but it triggers another question: what
company (or kind of companies) would want GCC plugins to happen really fast?
Is there any big coorporation, already contributing to GCC, which needs
plugin quickly? I cannot name any.
My feeling is that plugin will become progressively extremely useful to
*new* companies, which are not yet working within GCC. This mostly is
the case because in my perception plugins will open new use of GCC, like
illustrated by the "replacing sed & grep by gcc" papers from Mozilla
folks (Tarek et al.). My intuition is that plugins will mostly enhance
all the non-code-generation activities in GCC.
Big hardware companies (those traditionally investing in GCC, like
Intel, AMD, Apple, ...) probably do not need plugins (except if they
wanted to provide *proprietary* plugins, which I believe the next
runtime license will try to prohibit), they can and do contribute to GCC
inside.
Big software or services companies (IBM, Google) probably also don't
need plugins (except to enhance GCC with a plugin that they use only in
house and do not intend to distribute, but for that use an inhouse
patched GCC is enough).
So I cannot guess a company willing to invest big bucks on the runtime
license issue, but I am probably wrong (and not naive enough to believe
that companies will discuss their GCC related strategies & motivations
here, publicly, on this list).
Regards
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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