LLVM/Clang Replacing GCC In FreeBSD Base

[kraftman]

No, it's really the license that interests them. They have some hate of sorts against GPL stuff. I highly doubt this LLVM will offer any real advantages over GCC. Ever.

Even Linux devs complain about GCC and Theo de Raadt is probably right...

[susikala]

No, it's really the license that interests them. They have some hate of sorts against GPL stuff. I highly doubt this LLVM will offer any real advantages over GCC. Ever.

I'd actually be more inclined to believe that reason than any other. The BSDs have historically tried to replace GPL'd software in their codebase, OpenBSD/NetBSD and the PCC is no exception.

de Raadt actually commented on it in more constructive vain:

But that's never really been the agenda, see. Some people think we hate GNU code. But the thing is we hate large code, and buggy code that upstream does not maintain. That's the real problem... gcc gets about 5-6% slower every release, has new bugs, generates crappy code, and drives us nuts. This is just an attempt to see if something better can show up.

We're just fighting against an open source monopoly...

[RealNC]

No, it's really the license that interests them. They have some hate of sorts against GPL stuff. I highly doubt this LLVM will offer any real advantages over GCC. Ever.

[TechMage89]

Clang-on-llvm will ultimately be a big improvement over GCC in a lot of respects (speed, ease-of-use), but it seems like it's currently very immature. Perhaps the BSD developers are doing this in order to get the development resources put towards clang in hopes that it will get the development resources necessary to become a real replacement for GCC. Perhaps it will also help them make their code more portable by having to remove GCC extensions from it.

[nanonyme]

Everything that has to do with the kernel, along with things hijacked from the community like WebKit and LLVM, are open source under real OSI licenses still.

*shrug* I was thinking of migrating to clang just *because* of the fact that it uses BSDL instead of GPL.

[joffe]

I'm personally alarmed whenever I hear the word 'Apple'. I wouldn't touch half a bit of what that company supports or does. It's by wide and far employed policies that are more harmful to users than Microsoft's.

Then again, LLVM and Clang both seem to be licensed bsd-like, so if it's similar to the Google situation with Chromium, it's acceptable.

Still, I wouldn't want to use anything written by anyone that gets their paycheck from Apple.

Everything that has to do with the kernel, along with things hijacked from the community like WebKit and LLVM, are open source under real OSI licenses still.

[nanonyme]

Still, I wouldn't want to use anything written by anyone that gets their paycheck from Apple.

They have an svn repo where the source code resides, go check what those scary Apple engineers are up to.

http://clang.llvm.org/get_started.html

Though seems by that page that there are a few catches for early adaptors with even compiling C (C++ is way too immature to even mention):
"The semantic analyzer does not produce all of the warnings it should."
"We don't consider the API to be stable yet, and reserve the right to change fundamental things."
"The driver is currently implemented in python and is 'really slow'."
So this might at worst increase the required amount of maintenance significantly if put to use too early.

[calica]

Still, I wouldn't want to use anything written by anyone that gets their paycheck from Apple.

I'll take your printer.

[susikala]

I'm personally alarmed whenever I hear the word 'Apple'. I wouldn't touch half a bit of what that company supports or does. It's by wide and far employed policies that are more harmful to users than Microsoft's.

Then again, LLVM and Clang both seem to be licensed bsd-like, so if it's similar to the Google situation with Chromium, it's acceptable.

Still, I wouldn't want to use anything written by anyone that gets their paycheck from Apple.

[deanjo]

still, the big question remains unanswered: why the change to LLVM? What's wrong with GCC, where are the tangible benefits of LLVM?

It might be technical superiority (which I doubt for now), it may be because LLVM's license is more permissive (and BSD folks seem to avoid GPL whenever possible), it may be different reasons. Funny enough, the linked wiki page doesn't tell.

If anyone could shed some light on that, it'd be appreciated

Right on the front page highlights the advantages of llvm.

http://llvm.org/

and

http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html