Re: Contradictiory directions

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2021 22:15:50 +0100
> 
> The superiority of LLVM/Clang (and all its satellite projects) is in its
> focus on technical excellence, on a broad sense: the code not only must
> be performant, but clearly written and carefully architected as well.
> The social dynamics was more open: broad changes were encouraged, no old
> guard vetoing disruptive ideas, enthusiastic and welcoming community
> etc. This caused that both the source code and the community appeared
> much more attractive to all sorts of contributors, creating an snowball
> effect. The openness of the design, which facilitated growing other
> projects on top of it, caused a proliferation of academic, hobbist and
> industrial derived works. Some of them are closed-source, but many are
> not, and even the closed ones show a tendency to open and contribute to
> upstream because it reduces costs.
> 
> Major Clang/LLVM contributors like Google would have no significant
> issue with Gcc being GPL, but LLVM/Clang exists and it is much more easy
> to work with (at all levels: technical and social.)
> 
> Meanwhile, Gcc was under severe imposed restrictions precisely on the
> areas where LLVM/Clang excels. That's no coincidence: there was a demand
> for those features. Now the grip over Gcc loosened a bit, but it carries
> a rigid and obsolete architecture that will keep it inferior for many
> years, if not forever. Any advantage on code generation will be erased,
> sooner than later.
> 
> Since a few years ago Gcc improved after painfully breaking old
> constraints, pressured by the new competitor, but I'm afraid that it
> will be too little, too late. Linux compiles with Clang, and that's a
> very worrying signal for Gcc, because if certain distributions migrate
> to Clang, Gcc development will be over.

That rings a bell: it's what I heard 20 years ago about XEmacs vs GNU
Emacs when I talked (in person) to its main developers.  The rest is
history.

My take from that example is that the factors you mention are somehow
not all that's important for the fate and the future of a large and
flexible software package.  There are other, more important factors
that are left unsaid.

From my POV, GCC is a better compiler, by a large measure, for
languages that I use and on platforms that I care about.  As a user of
a compiler, I don't care about its architecture, I care about its
features, its usefulness during development, and the code it produces.
And Clang is way behind on these, from my POV.  And don't get me
started on other LLVM members, like the debugger.