Re: GCC is 25 years old today

On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:30:09 -0000, compilers@is-not-my.name wrote:


> You well know several
> people have expressed interest on comp.lang.ada in buying a developer
> license for a non-GPL GNAT and there was either dead silence or someone
> saying Adacore is not interested in small fish, even without support.


And this will never happen. It is not profitable to do (unless AdaCore were
able to generate some sort of irrational cult as Apple did).


>>> There are several significant compiler companies. Not as many as in
>>> the 1970s and not on as many platforms but there are still some doing a
>>> pretty good business.
>>
>> How could it become less in the era of mobile computing, GPUs, concurrent,
>> networking systems? When computers are infesting everything except for
>> maybe door mats (yet to come)?
>
> Because in the early days people paid for everything. It was only after UNIX
> with a healthy dose of Stallman convinced the masses of the values of
> socialism and putting their hands in everyone's pockets but not letting
> anyone's hands in their pockets (funny how that works) people started being
> a lot less willing to pay for compilers.


It is not Stallman's fault and it is not socialism. Socialism is when the
state re-distributes wealth. In the case of compilers, it is not state but
large monopolists at which mercy compilers are left. Customer money play no
role whatsoever, because developing is funded from other sources and for
reasons absolutely unrelated to the merits of a particular programming
language, quality of the generated code etc.


I don't care which system is worse, the effect is just same: stagnation.


> [Ahem. In the early days software was all free. It wasn't even
> possible to copyright it. Companies started selling it in the late
> 1960s partly because so realized there was a market for specialized
> programs (the first was one that drew the flowcharts that managers
> demanded from the code the programmers had already written), and
> a legal settlement led IBM to unbundle their system software. But
> the ancient free version of Fortran H still generates amazingly
> good code. -John]


Yes indeed. It was because the software was unusable without the vendor's
hardware. The hardware was incompatible and vendors were competing each
other. This made them interested in putting better software in the package.
That era of great compilers is gone. It is worth to remember brilliant
DEC's FORTRAN-IV, C and Ada compilers.


--
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

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