Historical context is not merely important, it is indispensable.
The statement in question was issued during a period in which software vendors routinely demanded several hundred — and in some cases, thousands — of dollars[0] for access to a mere compiler. More often than not, the product thus acquired was of appalling quality — a shambolic assembly marred by defects, instability, and a conspicuous lack of professional rigour.
If one examines the design of GNU autoconf, particularly the myriad of checks it performs beyond those mandated by operating system idiosyncrasies, one observes a telling pattern — it does not merely assess environmental compatibility; it actively contends with compiler-specific bugs. This is not a testament to ingenuity, but rather an indictment of the abysmal standards that once prevailed amongst so-called commercial tool vendors.
In our present epoch, the notion that development tools should be both gratis and open source has become an expectation so deeply ingrained as to pass without remark. The viability and success of any emergent hardware platform now rests heavily — if not entirely — upon the availability of a free and competent development toolchain. In the absence of such, it shall not merely struggle — it shall perish, forgotten before it ever drew breath. Whilst a sparse handful of minor commercial entities yet peddle proprietary development environments, their strategy has adapted — they proffer these tools as components of a broader, ostensibly cohesive suite: an embedded operating system here, a bundled compiler there.
And yet — if you listen carefully — one still hears the unmistakable sounds of malcontent: curses uttered under breath and shouted aloud by those condemned to use these so-called «integrated» toolchains, frustrated by their inability to support contemporary language features, by their paltry libraries, or by some other failure born of commercial indifference.
GNU, by contrast, is not merely a project — it is a declaration of philosophy. One need not accept its ideological underpinnings to acknowledge its practical contributions. It is precisely due to this dichotomy that alternatives such as LLVM have emerged — and thrived.
[0] Throw in another several hundreds for a debugger, another several hundreds for a profiler and pray that they are even compatible with each other.
The statement in question was issued during a period in which software vendors routinely demanded several hundred — and in some cases, thousands — of dollars[0] for access to a mere compiler. More often than not, the product thus acquired was of appalling quality — a shambolic assembly marred by defects, instability, and a conspicuous lack of professional rigour.
If one examines the design of GNU autoconf, particularly the myriad of checks it performs beyond those mandated by operating system idiosyncrasies, one observes a telling pattern — it does not merely assess environmental compatibility; it actively contends with compiler-specific bugs. This is not a testament to ingenuity, but rather an indictment of the abysmal standards that once prevailed amongst so-called commercial tool vendors.
In our present epoch, the notion that development tools should be both gratis and open source has become an expectation so deeply ingrained as to pass without remark. The viability and success of any emergent hardware platform now rests heavily — if not entirely — upon the availability of a free and competent development toolchain. In the absence of such, it shall not merely struggle — it shall perish, forgotten before it ever drew breath. Whilst a sparse handful of minor commercial entities yet peddle proprietary development environments, their strategy has adapted — they proffer these tools as components of a broader, ostensibly cohesive suite: an embedded operating system here, a bundled compiler there.
And yet — if you listen carefully — one still hears the unmistakable sounds of malcontent: curses uttered under breath and shouted aloud by those condemned to use these so-called «integrated» toolchains, frustrated by their inability to support contemporary language features, by their paltry libraries, or by some other failure born of commercial indifference.
GNU, by contrast, is not merely a project — it is a declaration of philosophy. One need not accept its ideological underpinnings to acknowledge its practical contributions. It is precisely due to this dichotomy that alternatives such as LLVM have emerged — and thrived.
[0] Throw in another several hundreds for a debugger, another several hundreds for a profiler and pray that they are even compatible with each other.