[Devid2014]

IMHO GCC has already lost this batle. Today one developer can create incredible tools using Clang/LLVM coda-base and release it as open-source or if he wants as closed source. This is just impossible with GCC. GCC is just a compiler but Clang is much more as this is a very powerful compiler building library... If we talk about C++ then Clang already support C++14 but GCC still not. And yes License matters, GPL just does not allow to use GCC in most cases. But today one does not need GCC at all any more, there is Clang. gcc-xml was a hope many years ago but it just died, and today all this can be made much much easier and faster using Clang. Clang is standard on OSX. Some Linux distributions already switching to the Clang. Clang support for Windows is already on the way.

So if nothing will be changes in GCC politics then it will become unnecessary in the future. Of course some will still use it but only as political reasons.

[vonbladet]

> Today one developer can create incredible tools using Clang/LLVM coda-base and release it as open-source or if he wants as closed source. This is just impossible with GCC.

By design.

> And yes License matters, GPL just does not allow to use GCC in most cases.

By design.

[coldcode]

At that rate GCC will eventually die in obsolescence. By design, apparently.

[lucian1900]

And esr is saying that perhaps it is (no longer) a good design.