[Nelson69]

Does GCC need to compete with clang at all? What's that mean exactly? Other than in terms of compile speed, it just seems like most modern compilers sort of reach some level of maturity and you really have to fabricate benchmarks to demonstrate that interesting of a difference between them.

ESR is just trolling. What his bug is, I don't know. Seems like he's dancing around something that might be interesting and more inline with the social observation that he's a little better at. I assert that GCC doesn't actually compete and doesn't need to compete. It just has to be available and it simply has to have hackers that are willing to work on it for the principle. Let's just assume that clang takes over the world, consistently produced better code than GCC, etc.. What exactly does that matter to GCC? Presumably hackers will stop working on GCC, but guile, hurd, and numerous other GNU projects show that that isn't always the case. I think that as long as GNU exists and they have some money and fans, there will be GCC contributors. Is there some other fear of what will happen if people use a different tool chain? Conversely, BSD has depended upon GCC for decades and I'm not convinced that that has affected it in any way and their switch to clang I suspect isn't going to radially alter things either. If we go back a week or two, I don't know that emacs' choice of revision control software makes any difference to its use, it may have some amount of impact on people contributing to it but I don't think that is clear cut either, there are A LOT of emacs contributions that aren't in the main tree... Also these projects don't want 'drive by' contributions, they want actively involved supporters.

Seems like he's dancing around some social observations that he wants to be true but can't prove or they might not be true. People hack on stuff because they have an itch, that itch might be technical need, it might be some sense of aesthetic that they think isn't being answered, it could also be related to something like freedom. When do other factors outweigh the itch? Now maybe GCC is GNU's most important software asset and there is some larger social thing ESR is worried about or has observed.