[lmm]

> The point is, gcc doesn't need to relax its policies to better compete with LLVM, it just needs to become a technically better product.

gcc has an explicit policy against making the code modular and reusable, for political reasons (to make it hard to use individual pieces of GCC as independent programs, which could form part of a proprietary compiler toolchain). The point is, this political policy has made gcc's code technically inferior in some ways to clang (modular code, with separation of concerns and clearly defined interfaces between components, is a technically good thing). GCC can't resolve this technical problem without abandoning this policy.

> Why can't a newer version of gcc be based on parts of LLVM, if the latter is considered superior by so many people?

That would inherently mean abandoning this policy. And the answer is that while it's possible, the GCC codebase is still good, it still outperforms clang in many cases, and pulling in parts of clang would already require cleaning up and modularizing the GCC codebase - at which point we'd quite possibly end up with a compiler that's better than clang in all respects. So why not just do that?

[fafner]

> GCC can't resolve this technical problem without abandoning this policy

It seems to have been abandoned. GCC supports plugins and is working towards modularization.