Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On 11/09/2024 19:02, Thomas Koenig wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> schrieb:

On 11/09/2024 10:54, Michael S wrote:

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 23:51:20 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 07:43:53 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
>

[MIPS] has been abandoned and replaced by RISC-V several years ago.
  

>
I’m not so sure the MIPS architecture has been “abandoned”. Last I
heard, it was still shipping hundreds of millions of chips per year.

>
Care to point to the source of this claim? Two main suppliers of MIPS
silicon in this century are Microchip and Cavium (now owned by Marvell).
>
According to my understanding Microchip's MIPS-based PIC32 line was
never as popular as their other offerings.

>
IMHO a major reason for that is Microchip's insane licensing policy for
their development tools - although their compilers are just a minor
modification of standard gcc, you have to pay huge amounts if you want
to use the full features of the compiler.  (At least now you can enable
/some/ optimisation without a paid license.)  It is not even possible to
see from the release notes or documentation what version of gcc is
provided, though my guess is that it is pretty old (the documentation
describes "-std" options up to C++14).

 Sounds like a violation of the GPL.  Do they provide the sources?

Yes.
It's perfectly fine to take the gcc sources, add in some code that checks for a paid license of some sort, and distribute that as a binary - as long as you also provide the source for it.  So you /could/ take the source and compile it yourself (or just get the original gcc source, or another binary build of gcc MIPS).
But the license for their header files, SDKs, libraries, IDE (which, IIRC, was basically NetBeans) and other tools says you can only use them with an unmodified binary that they provide.  And writing your own header files for a big microcontroller is not a quick and easy job.
I believe there was no legal violation of the GPL, but there was no doubt that it was trashing the spirit of it.
And as far as I could see from a look at their website, they are still at the same game (though you can now enable /some/ optimisations), now with the ARM core PIC32 devices as well.
Every other ARM or RISC V based microcontroller manufacturer I have seen provides free gcc and/or clang tools, along with a free IDE (Eclipse or MS Code).  They will also provide support for paid tools like ARM's development tools, or IAR, or maybe Green Hills - these are expensive, but that's fair enough.  What is not fair, even if it is legal, is taking something that they get for free and charging multiple kilodollars for people to use it.