this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
212 points (93.4% liked)
Games
32521 readers
1516 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This doesn't make sense as the compilers would also be included in this new copyright scheme and would become public property after so much time.
There are open source compilers for all major CPU architectures. In fact the open source compilers regularly outperform the closed source ones. It's also not exactly that difficult to add on more architectures to an existing compiler these days thanks to the modular way modern compilers are built. Once you build a backend for LLVM you unlock not just one language but about a dozen.
Others have mentioned existing efforts to form reproducible results. So, this might be irrelevant now; but I’m fairly sure if the mindset was “open source compilers are always better than extremely expensive ones”, the expensive ones wouldn’t have a reason to exist.
That could be an old mindset. (Of course, binaries made way back in that age are part of how we got in this mess)
Actually their reason to exist is that some software and hardware platforms don't have a real open source alternative.
I have a friend who works with some of these compilers, and also with low level assembly language and stuff. He tells me most of the closed source compilers he works with are way behind the open source ones including Microsoft's compiler. I've seen some evidence of this myself too. The reason people use the Microsoft one is because it integrates better with the Windows APIs and Visual Studio, or just because they don't know better. I believe Microsoft even have an initiative to integrate LLVM into Visual Studio because they know how bad their compiler is in comparison. Since it's by a large company specialising in systems software theirs is probably one of the better examples.
In the Apple ecosystem they use LLVM for C and C++. The only stable Rust compiler afaik is LLVM based, though they are working on their own alternative which will also be open source.