[DotGNU]gcc?

[Marco Manfredini]

Rhys Weatherley wrote:
[snip]

>
> This would allow proprietary language implementors to
> get around the GPL on the RTL code.  They could write
> a very simple language->IL convertor, and then use the
> super-assembler to do all of the hard native translation
> work for them.  And the big bonus to them is that they
> don't need to GPL their front-end: it's just generating a
> text stream to a widely published format.
>
I don't quite get it. Why is that different from a proprietary language
implementor who generates one of the supported languages and feeds this
into gcc?

This would only make a sense to me, if one can expect that

p.i.l -> IL -> native

produces a -significant- better result that

p.i.l -> "C/C++/Fortran" -> IL -> native

Which looks unlikely to me, since it is the task of the opmtimizer to
cook its input until it contains not more than the neccesary, no matter
was the input was.

[Btw. I hit "reply" to Rhys' message, which put rhys Email into the 
recipient field & I didn't realize that and send him the message 
exclusively. Now I've set the reply-to for this msg, but couldn't this 
be made by the mailing-list software? I find this distracting, because 
all other lists I'm on set the reply-to field]

--
Marco