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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."
I guess the question should be whether this compiler produces applications that crash less. In my experience, the crashes in current Linux applications are due to in large part, to GCC, though code quality also has something to do with these crashes.
It is official. Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
You do realize that GCC was a duplication of effort? If it wasn't for licensing obsessives you'd still be using PCC right now.
Oh goody, I just can't get enough of Theo De Rant -- I've been jonesing for a troll ever since Darl McBride realized it's better to shut the hell up.
Not really. FSF has shown beyond reasonable doubt that they will change the terms of their license according to their whim and to suit their agenda without any regard whatsoever to their user and developer base, at the drop of a hat and without listening to valid criticism. I have no doubt they will do it again. In their power-hungry madness they will try to force their users into complete slavery, and I believe GCC will be one of the first instruments to their supposed rise to world domination - only it will bring about their destruction when everybody but the most foaming-at-the-mouth-zealots moves on to serious OSs and lets FSF and their EFFing lackeys dwindle away into irrelevance.
Aplogies for the tone of utter disgust and somewhat unexplainable epic. The first is inspired by your reference to Stallman. The second, I just felt like trying on for size.
Global warming is a cube.
"Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts"
The more I read about GPL v3, the more poisonous and viral it appears to be. Overall, the BSD and MIT licenses appear to be the most reasonable. The revival of PCC is a direct response to GPL v3 since GCC (and much of the software hosted at FSF) will more than likely migrate to GPL v3, which seems to make many of the BSD folks quite nervous.