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by Al-Khwarizmi 4538 days ago
I definitely don't hate GCC, for a long time it was the best free compiler that I knew so I am really grateful to the people that made it possible.

But honestly, after seeing the error messages of Clang compared to those of GCC, I have zero intention of going back to GCC.

It may be that GCC generates better code (to be honest, I don't know) but 99% of the time that I'm using a compiler, I'm interacting with the error messages. The quality of the error messages has a real, significant impact in my development time. And if I want better code, I can always use GCC for the final compilation after doing all the debugging work with Clang.

As I said, I can't say I hate GCC, it's a free product and many, many wonderful projects have been compiled with it. But I honestly don't understand why, after all these years of development, the error messages are still that bad.

1 comments

GCC error messages aren't that bad. Could it be that you compare the old Apple GCC to the latest clang?