Re: KEil bought by ARM

Chris Hills wrote:

SO lets get this straight.

To build an old version of the open source compiler you need to archive
the old version AND all the tools needed to build it AND any tools
needed to build them etc.

Don't you think you're getting a bit absurd here? Where do you stop? Obviously you need to archive the source of the compiler and its associated tools and libraries. But there is no need to archive the tools used to build that compiler. The only possible reasons why the tools used to build the compiler could make a difference are if the older tools had a bug that the compiler depended on (a rarity indeed), the new tools have a bug that broke the compilation (also rare, and easily spotted), or that the old and new tools had different assumptions such as the size of various types (also rare for modern PC tools, and easily checked). To be an issue, the old and new tools would have to differ in such a way that they could each properly build the cross-compiler so that it ran apparently error-free but generated different target code.

And if you really want to get the old tools, then every release of gcc is a simple download away.


BTW having build from source code a compiler how do you test and PROVE
is is the same one you built before and how do you validate it? 

All the decent commercial compiler suites are rigorously tested and
validated against industry standard and accepted validation suites.

What do you use to test and validate the open source compiler you have
just built? You have to show that it IS the EXACTLY same tool that was
validated (I  hope) previously. How do you do this and PROVE that the
source has not been modified?



Nothing in this is any different from using commercial compilers - except that you can't do any of the testing or comparisons yourself. If your (hypothetical) compiler vendor is happy to give you an old compiler modified to use a new dongle, have you any way of knowing that it really is the same old compiler as you used before? Do you know that they used the same tools to build the modified compiler? Of course you don't know - in fact, you can be very confident that they don't.



OR

You could archive the commercial compiler you used at the time. 

Excluding the dongle IF the commercial compiler will not run on the
modern OS then neither will the open source version for the same
reasons.

The only problem is the dongle. Most compiler vendors will crack their
own system to use a current dongle if that is required.


Could you give us some pointers to compiler vendors' web pages stating their policy of making and distributing such old compiler versions for the asking (for a reasonable price if required), since "most" vendors will do this for you? While you are at it, could you point to some of these "validations" and "qualifications" that "decent commercial compilers" have?

I have no doubt that some vendors do have this sort of level of customer support. But I have very great doubts that it applies to "most" - the economics simply doesn't make sense.


There are plenty of arguments for using particular commercial compilers rather than open source tools, such as ease of use, customer support, target support, integration with other tools, quality of generated code or libraries, documentation, etc. But for ease of archiving old compilers, or supporting legacy systems, or transferring tools to other computers, closed-source tools (or any other software) cannot come close to competing with open-source.


How do you qualify, validate and test the open source tools to the same
standards as the commercial tools? You use Plum-Hall, Perennial or
similar perhaps? 



.

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