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Comment by mstevens | Hacker News Reader

BSD people tend to like BSD licensed things.

Compiler licensing is not enough to supersede the BSDs' pragmatism. We've been using GCC for years.

If you've had to maintain GCC for your platform -- or worse yet, tried to add even small improvements -- you'd understand why momentum is building to replace it.

Not that switching to GPLv3 helped GCC any. That's one reason among many that Apple stopped GCC development and put their weight behind LLVM.

I think it's more the bugs, which tend to show up in kernel code, and the ability to extend the compiler with security features, which is difficult in the rather hairy gcc code. OpenBSD used a custom gcc 2.95 derived compiler for ages because of bug fixes and their security extensions.

An other problem is when GCC drops architecture support -- say some old arch which Linux doesn't run on but which the BSDs do -- then the BSDs are forced to maintain multiple old versions of GCC...

Which architectures are those? And this is a FreeBSD announcement, which has a much more limited port list than NetBSD.

OpenBSD != FreeBSD. Very different beasts.

Here are the hardware platforms that OpenBSD runs on (http://openbsd.org/plat.html). Not as many as NetBSD, but several.

Porting a program that was written primarily with (say) i386 Debian Linux in mind to other platforms is a great way to find bugs due to incorrect assumptions. They may be asymptomatic on systems with 32-bit processors, the same endian-ness, etc., but they're just lying dormant. Patches from porting and the OpenBSD security audits are contributed upstream, too.

Once upon a time Theo was considering the Plan9 tool chain for the OpenBSD project. Sadly Lucent's lawyers proved not too adept and writing software licenses in what was a brave new world of OSS.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/browse_thread/t...

The previous license was worse, it had a "make any modifications and you have to send them back to Lucent" clause.

Theo was right and the world was robbed and the now the compilers are available in either GPL, LGPL, Lucent or MIT license form from the Vita Nuova Inferno project.

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/downloads.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/contents.html

And a hybrid license through Plan9Ports

http://swtch.com/plan9port/

What a fuck up.

You mean simple things. The preamble to the GPL is longer than the entire ISC license... by like 5 times. GCC is like 100 times more complex than PCC. BSD folks like simple, secure things.

To add some numbers to that, PCC appears to be about 20,000 lines of code [1] and LLVM+clang together about 550,000 lines [2]. I can't immediately find a figure for GCC, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was significantly more than LLVM+clang.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/magnusson_pcc.pdf [2] http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/clang-builds-llvm.html

Not that LOC necessarily says anything on code complexity or design, but here's sloccount on gcc42:

  ansic:       869244 (70.89%)
  ada:         150280 (12.26%)
  cpp:         114629 (9.35%)
  f90:          34164 (2.79%)
  sh:           18588 (1.52%)
  objc:         13047 (1.06%)
  exp:           8821 (0.72%)
  fortran:       7139 (0.58%)
  asm:           4422 (0.36%)
  ml:            2485 (0.20%)
  perl:          1080 (0.09%)
  awk:            842 (0.07%)
  lex:            589 (0.05%)
  yacc:           587 (0.05%)
  pascal:         105 (0.01%)
  haskell:         98 (0.01%)
  lisp:            59 (0.00%)

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