GCC Compiler Finally Supplanted by PCC?

Sunnz writes "The leaner, lighter, faster, and most importantly, BSD Licensed, Compiler PCC has been imported into OpenBSD's CVS and NetBSD's pkgsrc. The compiler is based on the original Portable C Compiler by S. C. Johnson, written in the late 70's. Even though much of the compiler has been rewritten, some of the basics still remain. It is currently not bug-free, but it compiles on x86 platform, and work is being done on it to take on GCC's job."

Comments

Re:LLVM / clang

[samkass]

I was thinking the same thing about Apple's clang and why they didn't just use it instead. But the latest I've seen on clang seemed to indicate it was still in the early stages of development, and "replacement of GCC" was explicitly listed as a non-objective.

I think having a compiler that's not dependent on FSF's increasingly extremist political views, but it does seem like a lot of work for little actual benefit outside an "insurance policy".

Re:Interesting...

[FooBarWidget]

You are not wrong. The Free Software Foundation explicitly states that binaries produced by GCC are not covered by the GPL. (Why people never read the GPL FAQ is beyond me.)

I can only think of two reason why they want to replace GCC with PCC:
1. Because they can.
2. Because they're anti-GPL zealots.

Re:The licence is just the top of the iceberg

[tknd]

"- The whole design of GCC is perverted so that someone cannot easily extract a front-end or back-end. This is broken by design, as the GPL people do believe this would make it easier for commercial entities to `steal' a front-end or back-end and attach it to a proprietary code-generator (or language). This is probably true. This also makes it impossible to write interesting tools, such as intermediate analyzers. This also makes it impossible to plug old legacy back-ends for old architectures into newer compilers."

Well that explains a lot. And here I was thinking that all modern compilers were designed correctly with a front-end and back-end. So much for academics.

Re:Not for NetBSD for sure

[WilliamSChips]

Because they're worse ideologues than RMS(they believe that propietarians should have the right to fuck you over, and that removing that right is evil) and they could never work on anything that dared to preserve freedom.