Re: clang vs free software

[Lennart Borgman]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Daniel Colascione <address@hidden> wrote:

On 01/25/2014 03:02 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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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?

+1

It even make it look like free software can't do this.