Re: clang vs free software

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     Fine, but what's the policy now regarding features that require an
>     installed clang to work; can they be merged to Emacs proper or not?
>
> Emacs (and all GNU packages involving C code) should be designed to
> work best with GCC.  There should be nothing to encourage users not to
> use our compiler.

Well, if we are talking about a generally desirable feature, the
question then is what needs to be done in order to have GCC fit the
problem space.  Even with proprietary systems, the Emacs stance has been
to not support any Windows-only or MacOSX-only features, but to provide
general functionality when working under them.  I think that this may
have been some incentive in the past for some Emacs developers to port
some system-specifically implemented features over in order to have them
generally available and thus accepted.

So the question is what the roadmap would be to have the software in
question work with GCC as the underlying technology.  And if it turns
out (I have no idea whether it actually would) that the answer to that
would be "we did not want interfaces to do that in GCC since that would
have allowed using them with proprietary software as well" then we might
need to reevaluate our chosen set of compromises and policies and see
whether they need rebalancing in order to better help our cause.

-- 
David Kastrup