Re: Business of Compilers

seimarao@gmail.com (Seima Rao) wrote:
> I am eager to know what business opportunities are available in
> the field of compiler technology nowadays. Is it possible to run a
> company purely by selling compiler technology?


Tricky. There are decent compilers available for almost all platforms
these days, and in many cases they are free, thanks to GCC. A compiler
would need to be very good indeed to complete as a commercial product
with GCC and the various vendors (MS, Sun, HP, IBM, etc.) who sell
compilers for their own platforms.


Basically, compilers are a fairly mature technology these days, and most
people don't have serious problems with them these days.


> How sustainable would be such an enterprise?


That's tricky. Even if you have superior technology at the start, it
will be learned from and improved on by your competition. You need to
keep on inventing better stuff to sustain a stand-alone company, and
doing that to order is hard.


Your best bet if you have an idea for a superior compiler is to plan on
being taken over by one of the large commercial vendors. Intel regularly
buys software development tool companies, especially if they have good
ideas relating to threading.


> What compiler products can possible be sold these days?


Anything that makes threading easier to write and more reliable stands a
chance.


--
John Dallman, jgd@cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.

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