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For Linux, The End-to-End Is Near


Native Linux development tools work well for what they do, but true enterprise acceptance will lead to life-cycle solutions

By Andrew Binstock
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July 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 6)
For a community that was built byte by byte through the hard work of programmers, it is surprising that Linux does not occupy a more central position in the world of development tools.

For years, Linux has made do with products that were sufficient but not exceptional. At the center of the development universe were tools like gcc and emacs, which were the favorites of a vocal minority but did not represent the larger state of the art. And during the years of its emergence, commercial tools vendors were greatly skeptical of stepping into the Linux market to provide the better products.

This skepticism was based on the perception that Linux users would not pay for the tools (which certainly had some truth to it). The few hardy vendors that stepped into the market, such as Borland with its Kylix port of Delphi, soon came to regret the move. Even IBM’s significant commitment to Linux—a step that did more to legitimize the operating system in the enterprise than any other—did not result in a flood of Linux development tools for the platform.

The commitment came first; the tools showed up much later. In sum, the Linux market was a conundrum for tools vendors that saw an audience waiting for better products but unwilling to support the vendors or write the products they needed.

During the past few years, the composition of the Linux market has changed significantly as the operating system has gone mainstream. The rabid expectation that all tools on Linux should be free has been tempered, and as a result more commercial products are finding their way into Linux developers’ toolkits. Likewise, open-source tools have improved significantly.

While this trend augurs a future replete with excellent programming products, the current reality is that the Linux toolchains still suffer from a number of weak links.

Compilers
The history of the modern open-source movement begins with Richard Stallman’s two landmarks: his modification of James Gosling’s emacs editor and his design and implementation of the gcc compiler. Today, gcc still remains the default compiler in the Linux toolbox. Its original C and Unix orientation has been broadly expanded so that it now supports numerous languages that have a common heritage in C. It generates binaries for an extraordinarily wide range of execution platforms.




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