> I don't think it has been possible to sell a compiler which isn't a loss-leader in a bundle for what, 30 years?
I agree and personally feel that this is unfortunate and that we are in some ways imprisoned using mediocre to bad compilers by our collective refusal to pay for better ones.
i agree that we should have a better model as a society to produce things like compilers, but having a direct retail relationship with a closed source provider was pretty nasty.
because of tooling, large code bases, and weak standardization they had a huge amount of lockin. and only a single narrow funnel in which to address deficiencies.
and while certainly on a lower tier than EDA seats, werent super cheap. they usually had limited platform support. while they did optimize better for their targets, otherwise they were poorer systems than gcc, with all its warts.
Eh, the ones made by one or two people working part time and selling them as shareware weren't necessarily better than what we have available now. They may have been good enough for their time, but probably wouldn't cut it today.
And the ones made by corporations were prohibitively expensive. As a teenager wanting to learn, or a hobbyist making programs for fun, would you really pay $4500 for a compiler to tinker with projects in your spare time? There's one reason hardly anyone uses Delphi anymore. By the time they finally released a Community Edition, there was no community left that had grown up learning Pascal.
I agree and personally feel that this is unfortunate and that we are in some ways imprisoned using mediocre to bad compilers by our collective refusal to pay for better ones.