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GCC & LLVM Clang Performance On The Intel Atom
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Originally posted by smitty3268 View PostLet's not pretend that decision had anything to do with potential. FreeBSD doesn't like the GPL license and that's the reason they are switching.
Originally posted by Colin PercivalThe GCC situation is a bit more complicated than that. Importing new versions of GCC is a major PITA due to changes needed in FreeBSD not being accepted into the main GCC tree. We've been saying "gee, it would be great if we could get rid of GCC" since long before GPLv3 came out.
GPLv3 caused Apple to support LLVM development, which caused LLVM to be production-ready; and that combined with the general crappiness of gcc is causing FreeBSD to switch to LLVM. The licensing issue is a slight irritant, and without it we might have ended at 4.3 or 4.4 instead of 4.2.1; but it's certainly not the biggest issue.
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Originally posted by DavidNielsen View PostSecondly, looking at how the FSF has run GCC e.g. you will see that they directly prohibited things like plugins for reason not of technology but to protect their ideological bend. Thus disallowing, in practice, the use of GCC for things such as static analysis which LLVM offers us today. Static code analysis is just one of many technologies we could and should deploy to ensure secure and performant code. The FSF playing politics with the compiler and their licensing has actively prevented that, in effect putting Open Source software in a worse place than it had to be (so much so that Coverity has made a small fortune running such tests on select codebases for us - using of course proprietary software which I hardly would call a win for ideology overall).
Thirdly, I prefer a BSD/X11 style license (specifically I am personally rather fond of the MS-PL license but that is besides the point).
Making GCC effectively redundant code, and who wants to maintain two separate code paths which both have to be supported.
Anyway, I think there is actually a benefit to keeping some competition in the compiler arena, rather than just having everyone use the same thing. At the very least it should help keep software a little more friendly to being ported to other compilers.
FreeBSD have realized it's potential and have started this move
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Originally posted by DavidNielsen View PostSecondly, looking at how the FSF has run GCC e.g. you will see that they directly prohibited things like plugins for reason not of technology but to protect their ideological bend.
Originally posted by DavidNielsen View PostGCC is holding us back, the few areas where it currently leads such as proactive security I expect Clang will catch up shortly - as the tests show performance of the resulting code isn't holding for long.
I really see no facts supporting your claims but rather a whole lot of wishful thinking. And finally the one thing I think WILL be holding us back in this field is the lack of competition, thankfully now we have competition and I really don't want to lose it, unlike you.
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Originally posted by Shining Arcanine View PostThe issue is that a significant amount of open source software that uses GCC extensions to C/C++. If it were following the standard, there would not be a problem.
Besides the FreeBSD Ports team are working hard to patch such situations already so I doubt it will remain a problem for long.
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Originally posted by Shining Arcanine View PostThe issue is that a significant amount of open source software that uses GCC extensions to C/C++. If it were following the standard, there would not be a problem.
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Originally posted by XorEaxEax View PostWhy would you want GCC to be history? I am very happy to have competition (finally) on the open compiler front and the last thing I would want is a lack of competition again. Is this some BSD licence zelot/anti-GPL thing?
Secondly, looking at how the FSF has run GCC e.g. you will see that they directly prohibited things like plugins for reason not of technology but to protect their ideological bend. Thus disallowing, in practice, the use of GCC for things such as static analysis which LLVM offers us today. Static code analysis is just one of many technologies we could and should deploy to ensure secure and performant code. The FSF playing politics with the compiler and their licensing has actively prevented that, in effect putting Open Source software in a worse place than it had to be (so much so that Coverity has made a small fortune running such tests on select codebases for us - using of course proprietary software which I hardly would call a win for ideology overall).
Thirdly, I prefer a BSD/X11 style license (specifically I am personally rather fond of the MS-PL license but that is besides the point).
GCC is holding us back, the few areas where it currently leads such as proactive security I expect Clang will catch up shortly - as the tests show performance of the resulting code isn't holding for long. In the mean time your average distro will be moving to ship LLVM for the Gallium drivers, likely also for Mono and Python (if Google's work will ever get mrged) and many other aspects. Making GCC effectively redundant code, and who wants to maintain two separate code paths which both have to be supported.
I believe the sooner we start moving towards a goal of compiling our distros with Clang and obsoleting GCC, the sooner we will start reaping the benefits that are inherent to such a move. FreeBSD have realized it's potential and have started this move, I believe we are behind technologically and the time to start this work is now.
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Originally posted by XorEaxEax View PostAlthough it was quite some time since I did tests using ICC, I remember it failed to compile alot of things. Although it's a closed source compiler it's available for free on Linux (windows users have to pay), or atleast that was the case when I last tried it (many moons ago). It would indeed be interesting seeing the results assuming that the tests would compile fine.
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Originally posted by mirza View PostAdd Intel icc to the mix, so that we have some perspective. I am sure Intel will readily provide you with a copy, unless they are afraid of comparison. :-)
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