[tambourine_man]

Yet another one was going with LLVM.

Now that they had a decent running GCC on PowerPC they want to build a compiler infrastructure from scratch?

Apple is full of those decisions. I'm just glad they don't take advices from me.

[tinus_hn]

LLVM is because they don’t want GPLv3. They just went ahead with a stack where they can be in control on their own terms.

Basically GNU gambled and lost, they wanted to make a big stand against software patents and some other powerful forces had different opinions.

[GeekyBear]

> LLVM is because they don’t want GPLv3.

LLVM and Clang are also about having a compiler stack that provides the information you need for a modern graphical IDE.

For instance, GCC had made some decisions that made it difficult to point to which line of code caused a particular error message.

Apple's Chris Lattner covered this in a 2007 tech talk he gave at Google introducing LLVM and the (then) new Clang project.

https://youtu.be/VeRaLPupGks?t=1133

[ori_b]

> LLVM and Clang are also about having a compiler stack that provides the information you need for a modern graphical IDE.

Is that why all GNU utilities shipped with OSX were also stuck at the GPLv2 versions and never upgraded?

[cdcarter]

No. That's why LLVM and Clang were developed.

[tambourine_man]

Yes. Apple won’t use GPLv3.

Some things have good replacements with other licenses, like zsh. Others, AFAIK, don’t, like rsync.

[kitsunesoba]

GPL v3 is part of it, but as I understand, back when the decision was made GCC was rather inflexible compared to LLVM/Clang which was also a big factor.

[Longlius]

I believe LLVM was chosen because it was easier to make new compilers to work with it. GCC's intermediate representation was a bit of a mess for a long time and from what I understand, Apple did not find GCC's Objective-C support to be satisfactory.