[llvm-dev] RFC: General purpose type-safe formatting library

[Chandler Carruth via llvm-dev]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 1:53 AM David Chisnall <David.Chisnall at cl.cam.ac.uk>
wrote:

> > On 12 Oct 2016, at 09:34, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Given the tendency of utilities like this to become used pervasively in
> the project, it would seem a fairly heavy weight dependency to grow.
>
> A reimplementation is likely to be no less complex than any of the
> originals.  Both fmtlib and FastFormat are under BSD / MIT-style licenses
> and are both small enough that it would be possible to embed copies of
> either in the LLVM tree if eliminating a dependency were desired.
>

Sorry, by heavyweight I meant more that everything in LLVM would end up
using it, and so any potential license incompatibility would be a serious
issue.

And "BSD / MIT-style licenses" specifically don't address a number of the
issues raised in the licensing thread. I don't want to try to rehash it
here, but if we as a community think those issues are worth addressing,
that precludes depending on existing code carrying these licenses.

As a specific issue: if this code ends up transitively used in runtime
libraries, we would have binary attribution problems. So adding a
dependency on code under some other license is, IMO, problematic from a
very basic pragmatic perspective. It would move us back into having a weird
partition through the LLVM project of some code that could go into runtimes
but other code that could not go into runtimes. I don't want to go back to
that point.
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