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Usability Improvements in GCC 15

developers.redhat.com

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Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#21

Post by bombcar »

codeshaunted wrote: post #19
mort96 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC can honestly only blame itself for its inevitable increasing obsolescence. LLVM only has the attention it has because it can be used as a building block in other compilers. GCC could've made a tool and library which accepts IR, performs optimizations and emits machine code, but the project avoided that for ideological reasons, and as a result created a void in the ecosystem for a project like LLVM.

Is it still the case that the Linux kernel cannot be compiled using clang, or can you do that now?

I believe clang has worked for years now.

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#22

Post by kstrauser »

dralley wrote: post #9
mort96 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC can honestly only blame itself for its inevitable increasing obsolescence. LLVM only has the attention it has because it can be used as a building block in other compilers. GCC could've made a tool and library which accepts IR, performs optimizations and emits machine code, but the project avoided that for ideological reasons, and as a result created a void in the ecosystem for a project like LLVM.

Yet another reason why I'm not a fan of Richard Stallman. Most of the decisions he made over the past 25 years have been self-defeating and led directly to the decline of the influence of his own movement. It's not that "the GCC project" avoided that for ideological reason, Stallman was personally a veto on that issue for years, and his personal objection led to several people quitting the project for LLVM, with a co…

I think that's an unreasonable lens for viewing his work. Of course he values purity over practicality. That's his entire platform. His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned.

Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#23

Post by gkbrk »

dralley wrote: post #14
knowknow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind like how GPL 3 makes it infeasible for most companies to use/support free software. At least Stallman gets to feel morally superior though

And Free Software does not benefit from a morass of mutually-incompatible copyleft licenses that may as well have been proprietary since you can't use them together. None of the permissive licenses have this problem.

Which open-source licenses can't be used together?

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#24

Post by nottorp »

llm_nerd wrote: post #16
mwkaufma wrote: post #7

Usability improvement request for this article: don't hijack the browser back button :P

It's already egregious when a site adds history pushState entries for just clicking through a gallery or something, but wow adding them just for scrolling down on a page is simply bizarre, especially on a page about usability.

It's in the spirit of adding emojis to compiler output...

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#25

Post by optionalsquid »

mwkaufma wrote: post #7

Usability improvement request for this article: don't hijack the browser back button :P

In Firefox, you can prevent this by setting `browser.navigation.requireUserInteraction` via about:config. I've been told that it breaks some stuff, but to date I haven't noticed any downsides

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#26

Post by dralley »

gkbrk wrote: post #23
dralley wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Free Software does not benefit from a morass of mutually-incompatible copyleft licenses that may as well have been proprietary since you can't use them together. None of the permissive licenses have this problem.

Which open-source licenses can't be used together?

GPLv2 and GPLv3, for one example... It's sad when two licenses from the same organization are incompatible.

GPLv2 and Apache.

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#27

Post by dralley »

kstrauser wrote: post #22
dralley wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another reason why I'm not a fan of Richard Stallman. Most of the decisions he made over the past 25 years have been self-defeating and led directly to the decline of the influence of his own movement. It's not that "the GCC project" avoided that for ideological reason, Stallman was personally a veto on that issue for years, and his personal objection led to several people quitting the project for LLVM, with a co…

I think that's an unreasonable lens for viewing his work. Of course he values purity over practicality. That's his entire platform. His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned. Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.

>Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.

He threw open-source developers under the bus in the process. As a result approximately nobody writes GCC plugins, open source or otherwise.

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#28

Post by aengelke »

Tpt wrote: post #6
mort96 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC can honestly only blame itself for its inevitable increasing obsolescence. LLVM only has the attention it has because it can be used as a building block in other compilers. GCC could've made a tool and library which accepts IR, performs optimizations and emits machine code, but the project avoided that for ideological reasons, and as a result created a void in the ecosystem for a project like LLVM.

There is now libgccjit that aims at allowing to embed gcc https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/jit/ There is an alternative backend to rustc that relies on it.

libgccjit is, despite its name, just another front-end for GIMPLE. The JIT-part is realized through compiling the object file to a shared library and using dlopen on this.

One big problem with libgccjit, despite its fairly bad compile-time performance, is that it's GPL-licensed and thereby makes the entire application GPL, which makes it impossible to use not just in proprietary use-cases but also in cases where incompatible licenses are involved.

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#29

Post by staplung »

codeshaunted wrote: post #10

Big fan of all of this except for the emojis in my console

On the one hand I feel like the #WARNING_SIGN is a welcome addition. On the other, I'm sensitive to the idea that it will be totally obnoxious if you need to grep/search for it in whatever tool you're using.

Was a little surprised to learn that the warning sign is generally considered an Emoji; I guess I don't think of it that way. Was even more surprised to learn that there is no great definition for what constitutes an Emoji. The term doesn't seem to have much meaning in Unicode. The warning sign - U+26A0 - goes all the way back to Unicode version 4.0 and is in the BMP, whereas most Emoji are in the SMP.

Re: Usability Improvements in GCC 15

#30

Post by aengelke »

mort96 wrote: post #5
jmclnx wrote: post #4

I hope gcc remains the default in Linux due to the GPL. But I expect someday clang will become the default. Plus I heard COBOL was merged in with the compiler collection, nice!

GCC can honestly only blame itself for its inevitable increasing obsolescence. LLVM only has the attention it has because it can be used as a building block in other compilers. GCC could've made a tool and library which accepts IR, performs optimizations and emits machine code, but the project avoided that for ideological reasons, and as a result created a void in the ecosystem for a project like LLVM.

I'd add code quality as a reason. I find it much easier to understand and modify code in LLVM compared to GCC. Both have a fairly steep learning curve and not too much documentation, but often I (personally) find LLVM's architecture to be more thought out and easier to understand. GCC's age shows in the code base and it feels like many concepts and optimizations are just bolted on without "required" architectural changes for a proper integration.
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