IIRC apple is one of the primary contributors to the Clang project, yes?
I wonder what motives they could possibly have for being so interested in compilers.
Not to sound like a conspiracy nut, but is it possible that apple could impose a restriction on the iphone apps :"must be compiled with our own version of clang" etc?
LLVM is a great step forward in compilers but it's ties with apple and the recent devious deeds it is capable of is holding me back from contributing to LLVM.
They're interested in compilers because, unfortunately, GCC has never really had any emphasis on Objective-C support.
What would be their motivation for restricting down to a single compiler? They had a (silly) reason to lock people into Objective-C; but that reason doesn't apply here. And even if they did, how would that be different from now where GCC is the only option?
One is that Apple likes control. They could hire the lead LLVM developer, own the copyrights, and use a permissive license, allowing them to exert a lot more control over the project.
Another is that Apple is allergic to the GPLv3. They have stopped upgrading to newer versions of GCC in recent Mac OS X releases, because they are afraid that the GPLv3 may prevent them from Tivoizing the iPhone and iPad.
And back when they were NeXT, they tried to release their Objective-C extensions to GCC as a proprietary patch, but wound up being forced to release them as free software by the GPL. They may want to avoid that sort of thing in the future. For instance, I don't believe they release as free software their implementation of OpenGL which uses LLVM.
So yes, I think it's entirely possible at some point in the future that Apple will say "you must use Clang to compile for the iPhone/iPad platform." And it may even be a special, proprietary version of Clang, targeted at a custom chip in the iPhone or iPad. They have worked very hard to have full control of the platform and toolchain, and made sure that it's all under licenses that will allow them to make it proprietary whenever they wish. They can't quite switch to Clang yet, as its C++ support is not finished yet (though it does cover enough to self-host), but once they do, I absolutely would not be surprised if they mandated its use.
Yeah, that objective-c extensions (and objective-c++ even moreso) thing went so well for FSF too. Apple still ships a forked version of GCC (and binutils for that matter) because FSF never actually took all the patches, so I fail to see what good it really did the community, especially now that there's a non-GCC compiler that is open, and has a mainline that supports ObjC.
I know people who write and deploy code in Objective-C on Linux. So while mainline GCC hasn't accepted the patches, keeping the compiler free did help the community.
I don't believe that the FSF's tactics are correct in all cases. I think that they could do better about encouraging and not alienating certain developer communities. But software freedom is a very important goal, and they are one of the few groups out there truly dedicated to software freedom.
LLVM is a great step forward in compilers but it's ties with apple and the recent devious deeds it is capable of is holding me back from contributing to LLVM.