[jhoechtl]

Can anybody explain the hate/aversion towards GCC? As I see it clang used to generae more meaningful error messages thats why many people turned toward clang. But it seems those days are gone.

Gcc still produces better=faster machine code. So why the hate? Are there political reasons involved?

[zelly]

> Are there political reasons involved?

GCC is more spaghetti than Clang, less modular. But yeah, it's mostly political/business/legal related. A lot of people hate copyleft with a passion like Apple and Google, who hire lots of people to work on LLVM.

The idea seems to be that LLVM will eventually catch up to GCC on quality of generated code.

[thedance]

Google didn't move to clang/llvm because they hate copyleft. They moved because people who work on compilers prefer to work on clang/llvm, and if you have a compiler group you need to keep them happy.

[loeg]

It's probably also true that the FSF is more of a pain to work with than absolutely necessary — they want copyright assignment, have some abhorrent code style, and still insist on tracking useless diff summaries in ChangeLog files long after the invention of RCS systems.

[bityard]

Hate is probably too strong a word but there is a contingent within the BSD community who perceive the GPL as "viral" and actively work to make as much of the project BSD-licensed (or similar) as possible.