Re: Defending GCC considered futile

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

On Sat, 07 Feb 2015 23:30:25 +0100 Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
wrote:
> * Eric S. Raymond:
> 
> > I'm pretty sure this is not true.  If the clang/LLVM people decide
> > they want to eat GCC's lunch, they *will* do it.  The reason has
> > nothing to do with any philosophical issue but merely the fact
> > that compiler technology has advanced significantly in ways that
> > GCC is not well positioned to exploit.  The clang/LLVM people
> > have both a clean-sheet technology advantage
> 
> LLVM was first relased in 2003, Clang was opened up in 2007 (but is
> likely a bit older).  Those aren't young projects by any standard,
> and I doubt their sheets are particularly clean by this point.

Speaking as someone who works inside LLVM a bunch: the LLVM people
are fanatical, absolutely fanatical, about refactoring and keeping
their architecture clean. The whole thing is kept extremely modular,
very easily modified, very well documented. LLVM *is* clean. It is, in
fact, architecturally beautiful. I wish it wasn't written in C++, and
the AST format seems unnecessarily complicated to me, but that aside,
I have few complaints.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com