Re: [Tinycc-devel] RE : CFront for TinyCC? (Was: Re: Re: global 64-bit variables initialization)

[u-tcc-uepj]

On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 09:17:39AM +0100, Christian JULLIEN wrote:
> With probably little efforts, we could have this front end working well with 
> tcc.
> Except mentions to AT&T Copyrights in source code:
 ...
> The source code in this section is posted with the permission of the 
> copyright owner for historical research purposes only.

Exactly.

The cfront archive maintainer declined to host a patch porting cfront
to modern pcc (which adds support for long long) referring to "wrong
signals" which such a publication would send to the visitors - presumably
by improving usability of cfront for practical purposes as opposed to
historical research. Nobody wants to take the risk of being sued by AT&T.

By the way, the official cfront 3.x distribution which is published is
actually broken/inconsistent and even lacks some library files. Apparently
this was not noticed at the time the CD was produced and now it seems
to be the only available source. It is still usable though, is much smaller
and compiles a lot faster than gcc, producing imho reasonable code.

> If put efforts to have a tcc backend for CFRONT, we should only supply 
> Makefile and .patch for AT&T source file with a similar notice:
> 
> "tcc backend support for AT&T CFRONT is provided for historical research 
> purpose only."

OT:

Not only patents, copyright is also a barrier (and a much longer term
one) in the way of technical excellence. If / as soon as the copyright
owner is not interested in distributing a product, the product is dead,
unavailable, unusable. How many here know that copyright is actually a
re-worded censorship, which it explicitly was in the beginning?

Rune