For big projects, especially open source ones, modularity isn't just good engineering practice. It significantly increases the chance of success of a project, because even if the overall project isn't popular subcomponents can be.
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Rails, split out of Basecamp, is an important example. Or ICU, split out of Taligent of all things!
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In my case, the biggest success of the Pathfinder project so far hasn't been Pathfinder itself but rather font-kit. I could have easily made it tightly coupled to PF, but then it would have far fewer users right now, because Pathfinder isn't yet done.
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Another example: Itanium may be dead and buried, but thanks to modularity it's also the reason you can throw exceptions in C++ and catch panics in Rust, because the Itanium C++ ABI became the de facto standard for open source compilers.
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Replying to @pcwalton
would the Itanium stakeholders consider this a "success"? :)
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Replying to @whitequark
Probably not, but it's more of a success than all of the compiler work going to waste!
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Replying to @pcwalton
it boggles my mind that LLVM still has an Itanium backend but (soft-)rejected an M68K one
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Replying to @pcwalton
I think adding a 8051 (or a 6502) backend would be a mistake, actually. you'll be working against LLVM the whole time and the generated code would be still crap no matter how much effort you sink into it
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I was mostly joking :) It’d be an interesting challenge because basically none of the typical code generation techniques work. I’ve heard that there are actually okay-ish 65816 C compilers, but that’s because there’s stack relative addressing on that arch
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Replying to @pcwalton
ah, yeah. I mentioned M68K because IIRC the reason for rejection was social, not technical
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Replying to @whitequark @pcwalton
Is LLVM rejection of m68k documented anywhere? I only found an email thread where the submitter was asked to do some refactoring and then ... silence.
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