Clang and FSF's strategy

Post by fhd2 » Wed, Jan 22, 2014, 11:29 AM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #8

fhd2 wrote: post #3

Sounds like the open source vs free software debate all over again. I don't have a strong position in that one, but I find GCC's position rather obvious: They want to support free tools, and they explicitly don't want to support proprietary tools. I cannot believe that this isn't obvious to esr, of all people. Is this just him trying to start a flame war? edit: I'm now aware that esr is not talking about license rest…

No. It's not that at all. The GCC/LLVM debate has nothing whatsoever to do with licensing, but crippling the design of gcc for political aims. Educate yourself on the subject.

Post by fafner » Wed, Jan 22, 2014, 11:35 AM UTC

Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #11

fafner wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GCC receives a lot of undeserved hate at the moment. It is still a very good compiler which constantly improves. E.g., for my projects it generates better (faster) code. But still there are a lot of flame comments made against GCC. It was very similar when Chrome was released and suddenly the web was filled with flame comments against Firefox. I think one problem is that many developers on Apple systems think…

There are very real differences between Clang and GCC - not when you use them as a client , to compile your code in the CLI, where gcc did indeed make big improvements in the areas it was not as good as clang, and was already pretty kick ass anyway, but when you try to use them as libraries, eg. use the AST to do source transformations, or use the code generator to make a backend for a new language. Using clang/llvm…

Post by fafner » Wed, Jan 22, 2014, 11:38 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #9

lazyjones wrote: post #2

esr seems to conflate technical differences with political issues here. clang is not superior in some areas because it isn't GPL'd. It's because it is a newer project with more resources and different priorities. Sure, it attracted some developers who didn't like gcc's and the FSF's policies, but so do all kinds of crappy proprietary products. The point is, gcc doesn't need to relax its policies to better compete wit…

> The point is, gcc doesn't need to relax its policies to better compete with LLVM, it just needs to become a technically better product. gcc has an explicit policy against making the code modular and reusable, for political reasons (to make it hard to use individual pieces of GCC as independent programs, which could form part of a proprietary compiler toolchain). The point is, this political policy has made gcc's co…

Post by fafner » Wed, Jan 22, 2014, 11:40 AM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #7

lazyjones wrote: post #2

esr seems to conflate technical differences with political issues here. clang is not superior in some areas because it isn't GPL'd. It's because it is a newer project with more resources and different priorities. Sure, it attracted some developers who didn't like gcc's and the FSF's policies, but so do all kinds of crappy proprietary products. The point is, gcc doesn't need to relax its policies to better compete wit…

You are the one conflating technical differences with political issues. The problem with gcc is not the license, but the decision to architect the system so that the intermediate formats are not accessible to plugin developers. Plenty of the projects that LLVM has made possible have no beef at all in licensing under GPL, however, under the current design of the gcc they are flatly impossible to write for it. This is…

Post by anon1385 » Wed, Jan 22, 2014, 11:46 AM UTC

fafner wrote: post #14

Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very real differences between Clang and GCC - not when you use them as a client , to compile your code in the CLI, where gcc did indeed make big improvements in the areas it was not as good as clang, and was already pretty kick ass anyway, but when you try to use them as libraries, eg. use the AST to do source transformations, or use the code generator to make a backend for a new language. Using clang/llvm…

> Using gcc's AST to do anything is an horrible nightmare, and you pretty much have to fork the whole gcc code base to do that anyway. GCC supports Plugins which allow you to access all internal structures. > Those things are not going to be easy to change because GCC wasn't designed to account those needs. They are working towards modularization. It will certainly not be an easy task. But I hope they accomplish that…