Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Paul Nathan]

Much of this discussion is passe, I am afraid. It is quite clear that Clang/LLVM are leaps and bounds ahead in the tooling field; I see arguments about if the front door should be locked, when it's plain that the back door of the house has been opened and there is a thriving auction of the goods from the porch.

If GCC is to compete on the tooling field, it will have to provide superior functionality that will not only meet Clang's bar, but exceed it significantly. I invite interested parties to play with XCode, Visual Studio, Eclipse, and IntelliJ to begin to understand exactly what the competition is.

I would far rather see a libre software product at the top of the field, but it requires adaptation to the current world. Let the data be free, please.

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 6:51 PM, John Yates <address@hidden> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

  > The long term result of all of this may very well be to do exactly the
  > opposite of what you want -- to convince compiler researchers that
  > LLVM is the only serious platform for their work,

Why do you say "may very well be"?  According to your previous
paragraph, they are already convinced, so there is no way to
make that any worse.

Richard,

That almost comes across as you playing intentionally dumb.  The paragraph you quote explicitly uses the term 'researchers'.  While some compiler and language aware tools research happens in industry surely the largest amount happens in academe.  Academic researchers constitute a continually renewing flow with those graduate students who move on into - typically to less 'researchy' - industry roles being replaced by fresh, impressionable talent.

Yes, we may be able to little to reshape attitudes of those who have left academe.  But are you therefore suggesting that the battle for hearts and minds of potential future researchers is unalterably predetermined and so utterly lost that we should not even try?

/john