Before GCC existed, UNIX vendors used to sell the C compiler + tools in expensive separate SDK, the same way the OSS community complains about certain companies nowadays.
Without it, the way we develop software today would look really different.
The new revolution is that the compiler is for free but you need the right patent licenses to use it. It's called LLVM. But they, it's modular, so we can ignore that. For now.
I was under the impression that [patents were no longer believed to be an issue](http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents "LLVM Patent Policy") any more than they'd be for GCC (which is arguably more vulnerable to patent issues).
GCC represents a lot of technology for parsing/compiler/optimizing/handling platform differences/generating executable formats, and it does so in a fairly traditional fashion. Generally with software patents, what really exposes you is doing things more like everyone else does. Counter intuitive, but true.
> GCC (which is arguably more vulnerable to patent issues)
And that statement certainly implies that A is _more_ vulnerable than B which promted me to ask what would make it _more_ vulnerable as I can't see in what way that would be true.
That's not exactly true. Most Unix's came with a compiler, particularly in the early days preceding the first release of GCC. I think Sun was one of the first proprietary vendors to start shipping a compiler separately, and I can't remember if GCC was already around when that happened, but it was at most an emerging trend when the GCC project started. I seem to recall that part of the impetus (along with the increased adoption of C for programming embedded systems) to switch to the more retargetable GCC 2.x architecture was the emergence of the "don't include the compiler" trend that made interest in having GCC for more platforms and languages, but perhaps my memory is fuzzy.
Perhaps my memory is not as good as I once thought it was. I had thought C compilers were shipped or provided gratis on most platforms until a short time before Solaris. I could swear AIX did ship a compiler for a while, as I recall a time when I struggled to compile Emacs & GCC with AIX's compiler. Indeed, I remember even Windows NT had its compiler available for free (not Visual C++, just the NT compiler). I remember OS/2 didn't, and that earned it much scorn. I also have memories of GCC being ported to most platforms (and originally, it didn't really run on that many platforms) before the compilers stopped being available.
Anyway, I really can't confidently stand behind those memories the more I think about it. The one thing I do remember was that when Sun stopped giving away their compiler, it was a big deal, and not helped by the fact that GCC struggled to match it's optimizer.
This sounds like an excellent occasion for the GCC maintainers to consider how revision control software has progressed in the last 25 years, and to re-evaluate the utility of the ChangeLog file; a manually maintained an "undo list" for all commits.
I thought gcc built its own bootstrap compiler to do the heavy lifting of the build. Can LLVM not build the bootstrap compiler or was I mistaken in thinking this?
Before GCC existed, UNIX vendors used to sell the C compiler + tools in expensive separate SDK, the same way the OSS community complains about certain companies nowadays.
Without it, the way we develop software today would look really different.