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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely hope this gets a good reception, and doesn't suffer the fate of previous attempts to add similar backends to the GNU toolchain.

In the past, backends for anything usable as an intermediate language received pushback as possible "escape hatches" by which one could glue proprietary code (whether frontends, backends, or optimization passes) into the GNU toolchain. That pushback mostly went away when the GCC Runtime Library Exception came out, which makes such proprietary combinations much less viable.

So, hopefully this will get merged, or at least get on the path to merging after further development.

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gcc already has frontends (GIMPLE), backends (LTO and HSAIL) and plugins (DragonEgg) that do this, so you've had nothing to worry about for like five years now.

I don't really follow. Do you mean, for example, BigCorp making a backend that compiles to proprietary BigCorpLang? Why would that be such a bad thing?

I think they mean it compiles to BigBorp ir which is then used with BigCorps secret sauce optimizing compiler.

That's already happening with the nVidia PTX backend, so I guess that's accepted too nowadays.

https://lwn.net/Articles/582241/

This isn't really a generic issue of "previous attempts" but more specifically LLVM, right?

No, actually.

There's been a bunch, from java backends, etc.

Yes, Stallman killed the JVM backend. Did not want to promote a proprietary technology.

In retrospect (Oracle v. Google) that doesn't seem like such a bad decision!

Admittedly, the concern about the JVM backend was different from what got Google in trouble; indeed, GNU had their own reimplementation of Java (GCJ / GNU Classpath) which was equally potentially infringing (and was the main reason bytecode output was a problem in the first place - because GCC supported bytecode input already, it could allow for round tripping). But the overall message of avoiding proprietary programming languages/environments seems prescient.

There is actually another voice from Free Software advocates on the Oracle v. Google case, basically saying that Google could have been free from Oracle's trolling in the first place had they based their thing on the GPL-licensed OpenJDK.

A sample of such statements, from https://github.com/biergaizi, can be found at http://weibo.com/1219205751/Dov1ynGLk (login-walled).

OpenJDK didn't exist when Android first started; Dalvik pre-dates the initial release of OpenJDK, let alone the viable versions of OpenJDK that came after further development in the community.

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