Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Stefan Monnier]

> It is more or less the same loss.  The case I'm concerned about is that
> it become normal to use GCC with proprietary add-ons.

My understanding is that people are satisfied with the current GCC
plugin licensing.  What is at stake here is the development of a stable
output that gives enough info for things like refactoring.

IOW the issue is not disallowing proprietary add-ons (we're all pretty
happy to disallow them, IIUC), but making it impossible to use GCC
within a proprietary product (e.g. a proprietary IDE).

> Nowadays GCC does allow plug-ins -- we came up with a safe way to do
> it (or at least I hope it's safe).  The issue now is to convince
> people to work on improvements to GCC.

Maybe that's the issue for GCC, but for Emacs the issue is to get detailed
info out of GCC, which is a different problem.  My understanding is that
you're opposed to GCC providing this useful info because that info would
need to be complete enough to be usable as input to a proprietary
compiler backend.


        Stefan