GCC Is Currently Faster Than LLVM's Clang At Compiling The Linux Kernel

[pal666]

traditionally clang lacked optimizations. optimizing compilers are slow, who would have thought?

[dwagner]

LLVM has always been faster than gcc in the same way that Russia is faster at developing a Sars-CoV-2 vaccine than other countries: By just not doing some things. It was always obvious that gcc, when it took longer to compile code, usually did so for good reasons, as in: better optimization.

And accusations regarding GPLv3 are just ridiculous: The "leeches" here are clearly companies who want to make profits off other people's work without sharing alike. Ah, and btw., the large corporation that I work for does, of course, use gcc for compiling all of our commercial software. No reason not to do that.

[AnAccount]

Yep. I did look outside of FOSS-fanboyism-bubble, and then I realized, that GPL's viral aspect doesn't contribute to sustainable economy... It's just, people inside FOSS-bubble are so keen on "Freedom as in free beer", that the opposite opinion heavily touches their communism and/or socialism identity.

You, the most likely, wouldn't be serving a beer (software solutions) for free in your own time, and using your own resources to purchase the pub (computer, office, table, other tools, and paid software licenses), because somebody gave you a free table under GPL license. That's the viral aspect of GPL license,... if you touch a GPL software with yours final solution, you must give away your product for free.

Ok, it seems you really do not understand the GPL, since you obviously confuses Shareware/Freeware with Free Software, since it is not free as in beer but free as in freedom. Anyway, you also say that GPL doesn't contribute to the economy, and yet again you prove to live under a rock. Remove GPL software and you have no Internet. Most devices in your house are running Linux which is GPL, and the license is a part of why it succeeded (there were already Minix, and we have all the *BSD and yet Linux is the one that are the dominating one).
And you say that people are not giving away beer on their spare time, and when it comes to beer that might be true. Still, a lot of people are doing voluntary work to improve society. But to be honest, most FLOSS development is paid development these days. You might have heard of a few companies that contributes to FLOSS, like IBM, Oracle, Amazon and even Microsoft (who could have seen that coming).

So, while even Microsoft came out saying their stands against GPL and Free Software was wrong, you decided to go the other way... must say that is impressive in a way!

[darkoverlordofdata]

Bug77 - You are putting words in my mouth. I never said people who give their work away for free are evil - I referred to corporations and GPL (the pyramid scheme) - both are legal abstractions.

[dreamer_]

Seriously.... Compile time does not matter that much. It is the quality of the generated code that really matters.

I matters a lot. Faster compile times mean faster write-compile-debug cycle.

But even so - I'm one of maintainers of a userspace C++ app (dosbox-staging) - we did performance tests to decide if we should keep using GCC or switch to Clang on Linux… and GCC was consistently producing slightly faster binaries, no matter the options we tried. It also generates more and better warnings than Clang, so it's a preferred choice for development and for release builds.

Clang on the other hand has better static analyser and has better integration with other tools (clangd + neovim work very well for example).

[k1e0x]

The GPL secures user freedom, our all freedom so to say, it does not grant you as a developer to trade the user freedom for your own greed. And thats why the GCC will always be far superior to LLVM and that not just due to its architecture.

So.. It secures your freedom to run a business? No it does not. Perhaps you want to link to proprietary code or non-gpl code?

Truth be told people have different reasons for writing code.

Some people want their code to live forever and advance all of computing, proprietary or not, for them BSD style is a good licence.
Some people like copyleft but don't like the restrictions of the GPL, for them MPL type is preferred.

GPL has a religious aspect to it and many hail it but in reality true freedom does not come with a long list of restrictions.

You do not need to give away your product for free, you just need to provide the source code with the binary. RMS himself sold emacs and there is nothing wrong with it, you can still make a giant load of money from support and distributing those free software projects.

And no, if you're talking about RedHat (Now IBM) They are a vulture company that uses it's corporate install base to influence open source projects. They are 10,000 miles away from "freedom". You can't use any of their enterprise products for free. (not in actual production) And if there is a competing project that is free they will use that influence to get it into their software stack or kill it. They sell software subscriptions and licences, expensive ones. In this they are no different than Microsoft.

[bug77]

So, if the choice is between supporting corporate greed or supporting a pyramid scheme, I don't really feel like there is much freedom for ME in all of this. I'll stick with clang because 1) I prefer it and 2) of the 2 evils, greed is more familiar for me to deal with.

Nice view of life right there. People giving you their work for free is now evil. Two evils, because there's more than one camp doing it.

[darkoverlordofdata]

So, if the choice is between supporting corporate greed or supporting a pyramid scheme, I don't really feel like there is much freedom for ME in all of this. I'll stick with clang because 1) I prefer it and 2) of the 2 evils, greed is more familiar for me to deal with.

[bug77]

Seriously.... Compile time does not matter that much. It is the quality of the generated code that really matters.

Yes, I have seen developers complaining about compile times, completely oblivious to runtime performance.
Another thing is the quality of warnings and error messages. If you're taking 1.5x the time to compile, but in return you produce a message that allows the developer to fix it quickly, rather than guess, you're actually helping the development cycle.

Of course, taking an hour to compile a "hello world" program is a no-no, regardless.

[JustRob]

I've been lucky enough to be in the bar several times when management from the local brewery came in and bought everyone free rounds multiple times, I was leaving and they were still giving it away - that doesn't mean that I don't like free beer.

I have a Samsung phone (is that "corporate" enough) and it has GPL code, and as is required they mention that when you go into the "About" page in the phone settings:

"libgnustl_shared.so (The GNU C++ Library) GNU General Public License version 3 Version 3, 29 June 2007" - just one example.

Much as it's difficult to get away without having to pay for something it's sometimes difficult to get away from getting things for free.

We've heard you, thanks for that; I'll be leaving now.