Why do you think the Zapcc developers would have worked for free on this? It seems pretty clear that they developed the software because they thought they could make some money off it.

And thanks to the fact that they did this, we now know it is possible. Competition will hopefully motivate the Clang developers to develop similar performance improvements in the mainline of Clang. Everyone will benefit.

A Clang user is certainly no worse off than they were yesterday.

Hmm, what about contracting? Exactly what Cygnus did with GCC.

or even GNUPro? \s

or it may never have been built in the first place

Riiiight, because these folks would certainly have spent the time to make a product that people won't pay them for.

As I mentioned in several other threads, in around 10 years time, the GPL will be sorely missed.

The only thing left will be the Linux kernel and a few major projects like Emacs.

The circle will be complete and we will be back to the 90's with freeware like licenses.

Most developers use whatever the company IT department and managers decide they should use.

Not everyone has the luxury to switch jobs all the time to use the programming languages they want to use.

Fair 'nuff. But let me ask you this: will those managers ask them to use a language without a high-quality open-source implementation? And if you look at the most popular languages out there (and even many of the fringe ones) the answer is probably not.

Unless they're writing APL.

I would say if you look at the companies around the world, from all possible sizes, not the SV bubble, the answer is yes.

What they care is who support their tools, who they are going to call, how SLAs are enforced.

Erm... what languages are you talking about?

I mean, I've genuinely unsure.

All the stored procedure programming languages of commercial SQL servers, .NET before Microsoft opened it up, commercial compilers of Common Lisp, C++ Builder, Delphi, Ada, C and C++ compilers for embedded development (no clang and gcc aren't the only ones), Coldfusion, Flash, Objective-C (gcc and clang are just a tiny part of the whole stack), Cobol, RPG, NEWP, a few in-house proprietary languages, Java compilers for embedded platforms with extended AOT features

Let's see.

-SQL Stored Procedure Languages, .NET (used to be), Delphi, Coldfusion, Objective-C, RPG, NEWP, and AOT Java are valid examples, IMHO.

-C++ Builder kind of qualifies, as the UI language is unique. So I guess we could count most UI designers as this.

-Ada, (most) embedded C/C++ compilers, and COBOL don't count, because open-source implementations do exist.

It doesn't matter if there are open source implementations of language X, if you cannot use them in processor X, operating system Y, rather the closed source commercial compiler of the processor X, operating system Y vendor.

Quite common in embedded space.

...I said most architectures. Many do have an open source implementation of C.

Which you may not be allowed to use within the company.