Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2003 11:36:47 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Cliff Sarginson <cls@raggedclown.net> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bystander shot by a spam filter. Message-ID: <3E13434F.D3F7A35D@mindspring.com> References: <200212312041.gBVKfr183480@hokkshideh2.jetcafe.org> <3E120659.3D60EB30@mindspring.com> <20030101140530.GA11468@raggedclown.net>
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Cliff Sarginson wrote: > Let's stop kicking Richard Stallman. > He has his own agenda. > But GCC is why you can compile FreeBSD. > Any of you ever tried to write a compiler ? > I have, it is not easy. And I am a self-professed genius. > Funny how no-one else recognises that. Maybe you aren't professing it loud enough? 8-) 8-) 8-O... Seriously, though, there are a number of possible compilers, but FreeBSD keeps adding constructs and removing portability, and, in general, getting more and more GCC dependent, as time goes on (hmmm... RMS paying pwople off?...). In any case, a compiler is almost trivial; what's hard, and takes specialized knowledge, is optimizing, and code generation, for more than one CPU family. RMS' great contribution in this regard is *not* the compiler itself; what he contributed there is actually a mediocre set of code, that other people then worked on to turn it into what it is today. In fact, he had to eat crow on EGCS to get it to be only a version successor to GCC, rather than a competing project. So RMS's contribution was the project, itself: the difficulty of writing a compiler is actually irrelevent to the discussion. It's amazing to me the number of people who claim to study the Open Source Software phenomenon, yet don't understand the basic principles through which it actually functions, well enough to start, or help start, a project and have it persist. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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