In an email to the GCC development mailing list, one of the main developers of LLVM revealed that his recent employment at Apple has been focused on integrating LLVM with GCC, and is now proposing a long-term merge of the two projects.
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Member since:2005-07-06
"The only way Apple could have success here would be to fork gcc, call it like, er, "agcs" and improve it so drastically that the mainstream is eventually forced to merge-up and include their desired backend on that route."
On a side note, OpenBSD has rolled their own modified version of GCC for a long time now as they include ProPolice in their version. On the other hand, they're still stuck on version 2.95.3. Then again, I heard that the GCC people now were considering including ProPolice, so there just might be a chance of seeing technological advancement get the upper hand of politics once in a while.
[Correction: They're mostly stuck on 2.95-3. Some architectures have a more recent 3.x version of GCC.]
Edited 2005-11-19 11:08
Member since:
Member since:Then again, I heard that the GCC people now were considering including ProPolice
That's not quite correct. The GCC people initially rejected ProPolice since their review comments were not addressed by the IBM programmer(s) who worked on ProPolice. The GCC people are not reconsidering this position.
However, a new implementation is currently being written by the GCC people themselves, and it will be one that meets the GCC maintainers' requirements. This implementation will not be called ProPolice.
Member since:
2005-11-11
This proposal would essentially mean shifting power away from gcc to the generic backend. The gcc people don't allow this to happen. AFAIR, Sun used to have an ANSI-C backend for GCC which would've been very neat to get gcc output run on really odd platforms with just a silly C compiler. They tried to get it included - no go.
This situation is essentially the same. GCC folks want gcc to be _the_ platform, not a tool, and _source_ as the preferred form of portable product. Plus now, that Tree-SSA is in place, there is hardly the need for yet another optimizer framework that gcc will NOT benefit from.
The only way Apple could have success here would be to fork gcc, call it like, er, "agcs" and improve it so drastically that the mainstream is eventually forced to merge-up and include their desired backend on that route.