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Eric S. Raymond Calls LLVM The "Superior Compiler" To GCC

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  • Eric S. Raymond Calls LLVM The "Superior Compiler" To GCC

    Phoronix: Eric S. Raymond Calls LLVM The "Superior Compiler" To GCC

    Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM's LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC's leading days are over...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    If GCC were to vanish from existence tomorrow I'm not sure I myself would be even seriously inconvenienced.
    Technically, there are still some packages that fail with clang/llvm, but indeed days of gcc dominance are becoming a thing of the past. As evidenced by debian's clang test results.

    One prominent problem is glibc itself, there are few more, but each subsequent clang version quite possibly fixes some problems.

    For the interested, here is a list from tests on exherbo linux where i set up clang as default compiler, earlier entries may already build with clang so they might require re-checking. On a fairly sizable install, it's not a lot of packages, tbh.

    Code:
    sys-libs/glibc
    x11-libs/pango
    media-libs/fdk-aac
    media-libs/libmodplug
    media-libs/flac
    media-libs/libsndfile
    media-libs/libtheora
    x11-dri/glu
    media-libs/tiff
    gnome-bindings/glibmm
    x11-dri/mesa
    media-libs/sbc
    app-text/poppler
    net-www/firefox
    sys-libs/db
    app-office/libreoffice
    dev-util/elfutils
    sys-apps/paludis
    dev-libs/spidermonkey

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    • #3
      Thanks to libclang I finally have really good autocompletion in (G)Vim that works better than all the alternatives. I still use GCC in my system and for all my projects, but I'm really happy that libclang is out there.

      Comment


      • #4
        Erics S. Raymond is a well known proprietary corps footpad . So that's what I would expect from him for sure.

        Comment


        • #5
          I do like Clang. It is faster and errors are much more readable.
          Sadly it is not a drop in replacement for me since it fails on my complex c++11 template classes.
          Did not find the reason yet tough.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by yoshi314 View Post
            Code:
            sys-libs/glibc
            x11-libs/pango
            media-libs/fdk-aac
            media-libs/libmodplug
            media-libs/flac
            media-libs/libsndfile
            media-libs/libtheora
            x11-dri/glu
            media-libs/tiff
            gnome-bindings/glibmm
            x11-dri/mesa
            media-libs/sbc
            app-text/poppler
            net-www/firefox
            sys-libs/db
            app-office/libreoffice
            dev-util/elfutils
            sys-apps/paludis
            dev-libs/spidermonkey
            firefox does compile with clang for quite some time (by extension so does spidermonkey), so does mesa and libreoffice.
            Not sure about the rest, I mostly use clang to compile these big pieces of software that would take minutes or hours on my box (firefox can take hours to compile and libreoffice takes forever as well).

            For quite some time clang is the main compiler for my projects, but "release" stuff still uses gcc (mainly because it's faster and has nifty hardening features that clang doesn't posses just yet).

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Kemosabe View Post
              I do like Clang. It is faster and errors are much more readable.
              Sadly it is not a drop in replacement for me since it fails on my complex c++11 template classes.
              Did not find the reason yet tough.
              You sure the fault lies not in the code? gcc does eat some code it shouldn't (by the standard), and might even produce weird stuff in result. I found clang to be more strict and reporting such violations in a concise manner.

              I love Clang, the one thing it falls short is the support for the gnu-linker and assember (=rest of the toolchain). Its not that you cant get it to work, but its breaking something that worked before every release. Usually you have to resort to undocumented cmdline arguments or features like using a symlink to clang with the prefix of your toolchain (eg. arm-none-eabi-clang).
              Unless you live in a primary supported environment for clang (native/linux builds) you still dont want to depend on it.

              Comment


              • #8
                Hopefully it won't be long before the entire Linux stack from kernel to libraries and drivers and userland applications are made clang compatible.

                Comment


                • #9
                  This "discussion", between ESR and RMS could turn out quite funny, time to grab the popcorn.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    I remember they tried to build the Linux kernel with LLVM and Clang and they got pretty far, but not all the way.

                    How does this look these days?

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