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0 pointsmoonchild5y ago0 comments

GCC was originally designed to not be modular so that it wouldn't be possible to integrate it with closed-source code.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

CyberRabbi5y ago· 3 in thread

Source?

macintux5y ago

Quick searches turned this up: https://lwn.net/Articles/582697/

arp2425y ago

Also something like: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

rms deliberately making GCC (and by extension, Emacs) less useful to "prevent misuse". The entire thread is ... ugh.

The funniest part is that it doesn't even matter, because now everyone and their mother has switched to llvm/clang for these kind of things, just as people in that thread predicted.

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CyberRabbi5y ago

As quick as the search may be, it isn’t good to search out sources for someone else’s claim because what you find may not be what they are citing and you may assume they are making a point they are not.

not2b5y ago

Not exactly correct. Rather, RMS resisted attempts to make the compiler more modular based on such arguments, but the initial design wasn't deliberately non-modular. The steering committee had to spend years persuading him not to block improvements that increased modularity, like plugins, and eventually found ways to persuade him.

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