13 Jul 2004 rmathew   » (Master)

Emaciated, yet Emancipated
Linux Weekly News (LWN) is an online resource of superb quality - dare I say it is The Economist of the Free Software journalism world - well researched and mostly thorough articles, quite up to date and fairly balanced content and a simple yet effective layout. I have enjoyed it for quite some time now and would highly recommend it to anyone who cares to listen.

For some time now however, the "crown jewel" of LWN, "The LWN.net Weekly Edition" has been immediately available only to subscribers (though it is made freely accessible to everyone else after a week) as even the LWN guys need to feed themselves, just like everyone else. So I decided to subscribe to it, if nothing to show my support for these wonderful guys, but found out that except for the "starving hacker" level of subscription, everything else would be a bit of an indulgence for me when the fact that a US Dollar is around 45 Indian Rupees is considered. So that is what I opted for and now I get all the LWN stuff as soon as it is published. Cool!

GCC and C++
The GCC Steering Committee published its decision (and that of RMS) on Nathan Sidwell's proposal to rewrite GCC in a useful subset of C++. In short, they have turned it down though they are open to the idea of making GCC sources compile correctly with a C++ compiler. What I didn't quite get was this:

In addition, RMS stated that the use of C++ was unacceptable for the GNU Project, at least for programs that are presently written in C.
This is quite weird and without more of the context in which this was uttered or clarifications, I don't understand this at all. In particular, this doesn't bode well for Tom's rewrite of the GCJ front end in C++, which by the way, is coming along pretty well for a one man project.

RMS also considers GCJ's capabilities to compile Java bytecode bad, considering it a way for malicious vendors to bypass GCC's GPL to use it as a compiler backend!

Whatever...

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