[gillianseed]

>What makes you think GCC 5.0 tomorrow will be better supported by your current development environment, than LLVM today?

Define 'current development environment', both at home and at work GCC is the primary development environment for me as far as compilers go, I'm not waiting for GCC 5.0, I am using GCC 4.6 today.

>comparable compatibility

Is a very fuzzy statement, having compiled lots of open source projects under many different compilers there are certainly many projects out there which fails to compile with Clang (but it's certainly making fast progress in compability). Granted most if not all of these packages were written against GCC and some of them may use GCC extensions Clang/LLVM does not yet (or in some cases won't) support or some other quirks which all compilers have in their implementations of different standards.

>Eventually, unless GCC makes a giant leap forwards in all the ways set forth in this article, LLVM is going to replace it, sooner or later. I think that's what the guy above me was about when he asked why GCC is still relevant today.

Been hearing that ever since LLVM (and later Clang) surfaced as an option, I'd say you'll have to set your hopes for 'later' (Clang's been around what? 4 or 5 years now?). Personally I can't see why anyone other than someone with an agenda would want either compiler to disappear, competition means better tools for us end users, no matter which toolchain we prefer.

As for modularization, that has been an ongoing task in GCC long before this particular mailing list discussion, and I think it will continue as it has now in small steps.

[w0utert]

I'm not saying I'd like to see GCC disappear. In fact, I still depend on it for all of our C++ stuff. The point I was trying to make is that GCC isn't that much better than LLVM in terms of how well it compiles every bit of valid C++ you throw at it. At least not if you have to compile the same code base across multiple different OS and GCC versions.

LLVM is not as good as GCC in some ways, but evidently better and more future-proof in others. Unless GCC evolves in the same direction as Clang + LLVM, the latter will close the gap sooner or later and basically deprecate GCC. I'm not advocating this should happen, not even predicting it will, just observing GCC is starting to fall behind in exactly the areas that make LLVM so useful.

> Been hearing that ever since LLVM (and later Clang) surfaced as an option, I'd say you'll have to set your hopes for 'later' (Clang's been around what? 4 or 5 years now?)

Well, it already replaced GCC on probably one of the most popular platforms for current development, so you can't say it isn't getting anywhere, can you? It's going to get interesting when we see some kind of Gentoo fork that uses it by default. That would be a good indication it is very nearly mature enough to challenge GCC on all aspects.

[gillianseed]

>Well, it already replaced GCC on probably one of the most popular platforms for current development

Incidentally the owner of that platform is also the main (sole corporate?) driving force of Clang/LLVM and has a history of wanting to incorporate open source into their proprietary tools which doesn't work with GPL licenced code. In other words saying that Apple is switching to Clang/LLVM makes no bigger point in my opinion than saying that FSF uses GCC.

[w0utert]

Apple uses LLVM to drive the very sophisticated auto-completion, static analysis, and error reporting features built into XCode, which are by any standard insanely good. No need to get politics or hidden agenda conspiracy theories along for the ride.

Also, I think you should invest a little time finding out what LLVM is used for besides as the backend for the compiler Apple uses. Apple maybe the only heavyweight driving the development of Clang/LLVM, but it is definitely not the only one using or profiting from it.