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The people actually making the GNU stuff aren't happy with RMS either. We need to extricate it from the FSF & RMS, not embrace a takeover by Google.

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e. hashman

@ehashdn

Mar 22, 2021

GNU projects and the free software movement are *far* bigger than one individual. Demanding people stop using GNU software due to association is just the mirror take of those claiming the FSF can't survive without him. He is not that important. Hold him accountable.

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And I'm not exaggerating here - many of the big alternatives are essentially controlled by Google, and Google pays folks who RT harassment of trans children to work on it.

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what of the less obvious things don't have direct alternatives? autotools is a good example I think. and I guess gdb.

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LLVM has a debugger, but see my above remarks. Autotools lacks a direct alternative because most of what it does is just wrong and doesn't need to be done at all.

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Google is far from controlling LLVM. They were contributing a comparable amount to GCC, binutils, etc. back when they still used it and before they'd decided to migrate to LLVM. The binutils replacements were a lot more focused on macOS and Windows before caring about Linux too.

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LLVM donated their branding to a stupid toy project of Google's just because Google wanted them to. They are controlled by Google.

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The libc project fits into the overall ambitions of LLVM beyond Google. They're very open to incubating those projects and accepting substantial code drops from big companies. LLD and LLDB are pretty good examples. Originally, it wasn't clear LLD would do serious Linux support.

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I don't think it actually does, but even if it did, the proposal to do it did not fit with LLVM project at all and was purely something of Google's imagination.

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libcxx.llvm.org, libcxxabi.llvm.org and compiler-rt.llvm.org have been part of LLVM for a long time. It makes sense to me that they'd want a libc implementation when they have a C++ standard library, C++ runtime and low-level runtime. I think it fits into it.

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Also, for context, they were perfectly happy to have LLD as primarily being useful as a Windows compiler without much Linux support. They'd happily take a project from Microsoft with currently only Windows support if it fit into the way they do things. It's just how they roll.

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Microsoft is headed in the direction of using LLVM instead of their own C and C++ compilers, standard library, etc. They aren't there yet, but I think the writing is on the wall, similarly to how it was with Google and GCC long before they actually stopped contributing to it.

6:56 PM · Mar 24, 2021Twitter Web App