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by frutiger 939 days ago
> Apple and especially MS seem to get a lot out of the GNU/Linux ecosystem and give very little in return

LLVM/Clang has been a huge boon to the GNU/Linux ecosystem, and dragged gcc into the modern era, and was largely funded Apple for many years.
3 comments
headhasthoughts 939 days ago
How has it been a huge boon to the GNU ecosystem? Clang is slow, the code generated is not consistently better than GCC for most of the software I personally run benchmarks for, and it's not like GCC has ever been worse for feature support than a Microsoft compiler.

It's better to point out WebKit.

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95014_refugee 939 days ago
> How has it been a huge boon to the GNU ecosystem?

It would seem that you never used GCC in the pre-llvm era. The GCC project has had a couple of notable periods of stagnation, in each case being "rescued" by the emergence of meaningful competition. First EGCS, and then later llvm.

Clang brought new developers to the space, it disproved the assertion that error messages had to be cryptic and unhelpful, and it has been a peer competitor for an extended period of time now. The two projects compete and cross-pollinate to their mutual benefit.

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deaddodo 939 days ago
People seem to forget that GCC was flopping around on C++11 for a long while until clang started pushing things along.

Not to say they've fallen behind, just that a competitor clearly kicked things back into gear. Same as Firefox and Webkit-based browsers did for the many years of IE6's monopoly.

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pasc1878 939 days ago
Not really now.

If you use Windows or macOS then you can open all your time using the OS suppliers tools or tools bought from third parties.

In macOS you can use UNIX but it is the FreeBSD world so no GNU or Linux there.

In windows if you want Unix then WSL which is GNU/Linux but you can easily work in plain Windows.

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