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Comment by whizzter | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they're hoping the remaining customers will cooperate on keeping it up to speed? I know that f.ex. IAR are building their own backends,etc and might be an EDG customer, the MSVC IDE team aswell, now if they'll manage to get it working is another question but with the code in the open there's a chance at least.

Why not defect to clang? I'm sure some PHB's will suggest that (and that will be part of the survival, convincing those that supporting another party is a good thing).

Standardization does have it's issues, but the JS ecosystem always seems to be healthier when one implementation isn't too dominant. The question is if the C++ ecosystem is large enough to support multiple frontends.

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The thing is, who's going to pull the cart? Giving stewardship to a nonprofit is perfectly fine from an IP perspective, and they'll have no trouble finding someone to herd some bugfixes, but what's going to happen when significant refactoring is needed to add support for C++26/29/etc?

Having your resident compiler expert upstream the occasional patch to keep your legacy product from dying is one thing, but which big tech company cares about this specific compiler enough to spin up an entirely new dedicated team for it? And who's going to choose a mostly-abandoned compiler front-end as a core part of a new product?

Sure, it can be done, but for each individual user defecting to clang must be looking very attractive right now.

Wouldn't it be Microsoft, since they rely on it for IntelliSense?

If they're all downstream users and rebuilding their entire infrastructure on Clang might not be the most enticing thing if they're deeply embedded into EDG in their products and EDG can be kept alive with small costs per company.

I think that's the point of the whole point of a nonprofit stewardship, that a few developers each from the main customers can come together and cooperate well enough on the upstream that they don't have to take the entire cost of changing downstream to Clang or maintaining a frontend.

There are fundamental differences in the design of clang and EDG at IR level that would affect whether clang can work for your use cases at all. I don't know enough in this area, so I won't say anything incorrect that would embarrass myself, but that's something you could look into.

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