Re: Ada on Apple's new procesors

[Optikos <ZUERCHER_Andreas@outlook.com>]

On Wednesday, July 1, 2020 at 4:23:30 AM UTC-5, Fabien Chouteau wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 1, 2020 at 6:46:48 AM UTC+2, Optikos wrote:
> > On Tuesday, June 30, 2020 at 5:40:13 PM UTC-5, Simon Wright wrote:
> > > Optikos writes:
> > > 
> > Gee, either
> > a) we all concurrently pulled it out of thin air via overactive imagination as you imply,
> > or
> > b) the following extant events & facts transpired:
> 
> The answer is a).
> 
> > it is quite clear that the intended reading of README.md is referring to the Apple-Apple-Appleness of bitcode since bitcode was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2015 as a key technology related to App Store submission and downstream proprietary processing by Apple post-submission:
> > 
> 
> It seems like you focus too much on details of a simple README.

In the desert, the only remaining single drop of water in the water-bottle is all that there is to drink.

> LLVM bitcode is sometimes used to talk about the general LLVM IR.
> 
> The example use case mentioned by the README are bringing more tooling to the Ada ecosystem, for
> instance with KLEE, or "connecting the GNAT front-end to the LLVM code generator".
>
> It took time and effort to publish GNAT-LLVM on GitHub, and AdaCore had absolutely no obligation to do
> so. To be honest, I am personally a bit disappointed to see such a long discussion on what is allegedly
> not possible to do with GNAT-LLVM (and was absolutely not possible before anyway), rather than all the
> possibilities that GNAT-LLVM opens.

The reason for the long discussion is that there are 2 valid legal theories in play, detailed in prior postings along this thread:
1) the Narrow legal theory (i.e., LLVM IR is merely RLE's assembly language.) which permits the RLE's exception grant to proceed for the app, permitting the app's license vast freedom to not be GPLv3
versus
2) the Wide legal theory (i.e., LLVM IR is RLE's IR due to both names literally being IR.) which causes RLE's exception grant to be elided, reverting the license of the app to pure GPLv3.

If all members of the set {AdaCore, FSF, SFC, SFLC} were over the years to have unanimously sided with just 1 of those 2 legal theories in a history of public statements, then this entire thread would have been quite short (or perhaps OP would never have been posted at all).  Again people who are walking in the desert diligently try to discern where water sources might or might not be before walking that direction only to find the perceived shimmering pool of water a mirage.  Better to expend a few words on c.l.a than to expend a few years in ill-fated software development on GNAT-LLVM-based app development to learn the hard way if the Wide legal theory eventually prevails.