[MuffinFlavored]

Do you know what sparked the change that uprooted gcc's "dominance"? I know the GNU libc added a lot of "opinionated" pieces, but I thought that was mainly opt-in. I'm curious why gcc "lost its crown" and clang gained all of the attention.

Did clang derive from gcc?

[brynet]

I don't follow, I'm sorry. OpenBSD has never used GNU libc. The BSD projects have long developed their own C libraries.

The clang compiler is a part of the LLVM collection, it is not derived from gcc at all.

As for GCC, The GNU project changed the license for their compiler sometime after the 4.2.1 release to the GPLv3. Meanwhile, up until the Clang 9.0.0 release, Clang was developed under a permissive license (NCSA). We're facing a similar problem now with LLVM/CLang, with their re-licencing to the non-permissive Apache 2.0 license.

[floatboth]

How is Apache non-permissive? It deals with more things (like patents) and it's a bit complex, but it's not viral I'm pretty sure.

[brynet]

The last time it came up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21020024

[floatboth]

Ah. Whatever. The common meaning of "non-permissive" is "copyleft", not "has patent clauses the OpenBSD project has weird concerns about".

[simcop2387]

clang doesn't derive from gcc in any meaningful way (it does implement some gcc extensions though). There's two main reasons that LLVM and clang really got a lot of wind behind it, and that's largely Apple and the GPLv3. Apple decided that they wanted more control over their objective c and other compiler infrastructure so they threw resources at the burgeoning LLVM to start trying to get it competitive. That was driven both by the difficulty of maintaining a GCC frontend & port, and also by the license change to GPLv3 that happened. That's also why the *BSD and other projects started throwing support behind LLVM and clang, because the GPLv3 put further restrictions on them that they didn't agree with which is also why gcc 4 is the latest version of gcc to ship by default with openbsd. That's also what has kept such an old version of bash on macos/osx. Clang's more favorable (for a distributor) licensing makes it easier to deal with for shipping by default.

That's also not to discount some of the other efforts that clang made to make developer's lives easier with better error messages and for a decent amount of time, better static analysis tools (they're fairly comprable now). Those definitely helped but I don't believe that they drove nearly the same amount of time and resources compared to the above points.

EDIT: missed the bit about the libc stuff in parent comment

GNU libc and gcc are completely separate. As the sibling stated, the BSDs and other systems didn't use them and gcc doesn't require or directly use it either. There is a libgcc that gcc usually needs, that provides a bunch of boilerplate/other stuff to bring up the executable but that isn't part of either the C language or the C library. It's things like a definition of the _start() entrypoint and things to handle setting up static variables during initialization and that kind of thing. It's also got a GPL exception specifically in it's license to avoid conflicts with having to link with it. It is possible to build things with gcc without linking to that library, but you end up having to provide it all yourself. This is how gcc usually gets used on smaller embedded systems that don't need all the things it provides otherwise.

[MuffinFlavored]

so BSDs wrote their own libc implementations, then historically (pre-clang) compiled them with `gcc` without any GNU extensions?

[simcop2387]

Basically, yes. I don't know if they avoided GNU GCC C language extensions but I'd be surprised if they did use any in any significant manner.

[J0_k3r]

clang did not derive form gcc. apple gave it funding because they don't like the GPL. and then everyone else who had distaste for the GPL (BSD people) also switched over when clang/llvm were up to par.