[pcwalton]

LLVM is still fighting GCCisms. (They even had to implement a subset of GCC RTL to compile the inline asm!) The sheer amount of effort they had to go through in order to compile, say, Linux, is incredible.

Besides, by your argument, LLVM should never have been started, because they should have contributed to GCC. Yet I'm very glad they did, because LLVM is much more hackable and this flexibility has enabled many new projects, like Emscripten and llvmpipe.

[jcsiracusa]

That's not my argument. It's a cycle. People tried to contribute to gcc, but eventually reached some limits (real or imagined, it doesn't matter) and created something new. egcs was another, similar crisis with a slightly different outcome. This is all part of the process. It's never easy, but progress is made. And we all enjoy nice things between the big upheavals.

[dottrap]

The limits reached are very real. The technical problems are quite fundamental and serious, but possibly fixable. But the political problems make it impossible to solve these technical ones.

See Chandler Carruth's talk "Clang: Defending C++ from Murphy's Million Monkeys". At the beginning between 2:20 and 4:00, he quotes Richard Stallman's response to their proposed changes and demonstrates that using gcc is a non-starter.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012...

[davidgerard]

And, most importantly, they are finally providing GCC some <i>desperately</i> needed competition.

[pyre]

  | LLVM is still fighting GCCisms

And yet this doesn't affect everything. Didn't Apple switch from gcc to the Intel C compiler? Does the Intel C compiler implement all of gcc's quirks?

[glasshead969]

Apple switched to LLVM from GCC. Chris Lattner, LLVM primary author works for Apple.

[pyre]

IIRC, I remember talk of Apple switching to the Intel C compiler ~ a year or so after the Intel switch. I'm not an Apple dev, so I don't have first-hand knowledge.

[dottrap]

No. I am an Apple dev. At least publicly, this never happened.

But Intel did have a presence at WWDC when the Intel switch announcement was made. Intel was trying to sell developers licenses to the Intel compiler (as they should).

[azakai]

Of course it doesn't affect everything, nor does it make anything 100% impossible. It just makes it potentially much harder.

A huge corporation like Apple will typically be able to overcome the additional effort.