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...

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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