Re: clang vs free software

[Daniel Colascione]

On 01/25/2014 03:02 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> We don't want to make a program's entire AST available for parsing
> because that would make it easy to extend GCC with proprietary
> programs.

It would also have made it easy to add modern features to Emacs and 
other free editors. Symbol table information is flatly inadequate given 
that in modern languages, typing information is highly contextual.

Users will adopt tools that provide these features when FSF programs 
support these features or not. If you keep these features out of GCC, 
users will go to Clang. If you keep Clang integration out of Emacs, 
users will either maintain out-of-tree integration or (eventually) just 
fork Emacs, as the various starter-kit packages have already essentially 
done.

Free software is great, but if nobody uses it, the entire enterprise is 
futile, sad, and ultimately irrelevant. How will the world be a better 
place when almost every every free operating system and free development 
environment is based on Clang and explicitly non-free derivatives are 
rampant?