Re: Ada on Apple's new procesors

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

"Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com> writes:

> On 30/06/2020 21:01, Simon Wright wrote:
>
>> There just might be a way round this: write your own clean-room RTS and
>> licence it however you please! If you didn't need tasking or most of the
>> Annexes, it wouldn't be that bad.
>> 
>
> Wrong. There's still the issue of "what constitutes IR" as I've spelt
> out numerous times. GNAT AST IR -> LLVM IR and the conversion process
> and whether the IR clause is activated.

No.

The RTS released with GNAT CE has had the runtime exception removed, so
it's pure GPL. The RTS released to customers is 99.99% the same, but it
hasn't had the runtime exception removed. Likewise the FSF GCC RTS. So
*as far as the licensing is concerned* an FSF user is in the same
position as a supported user; but supported users get support!

The only reason that the GPL and the runtime exception are involved at
all is because the RTS is released under those terms. If I write my own
(clean-room) runtime under say the MIT license then the fact that a
developer uses the GCC compiler (or GNAT-LLVM) has no effect on how they
propagate the product; and since the GPL and the runtime exception aren't
involved in the first place, using LLVM IR can't make any difference.