[dralley]

Well, not entirely.

The decision years ago or GCC to deliberately obfuscate its inner workings so that it was impossible for proprietary plugins to be created (but also free plugins also) heavily contributed to the dominance of LLVM. GCC is still the only compiler for a couple of obscure architectures and the main compiler for most linux distros, but it's starting to lose ground there too. And the tooling ecosystem has totally moved to LLVM basically.

And they have had little if any focus on the Web until recently, it feels like they're still living in the 1990s. Stallman's departure might have been helpful in getting them to start broadening their horizons a bit.

[inglor_cz]

Can I read up a bit more about that decision somewhere? Do you have any recommendations?

I noticed the massive ecosystem shift towards LLVM, ofc, but I never stopped to think why this happened.

GCC source code was always rather Greek to me, so making it even less readable deliberately sounds like a bad decision.

[johnny22]

Here's an overview of at least part of the discussion https://lwn.net/Articles/582697/