Doing a rewrite seems to me to always result in a cleaner codebase faster than the incremental refactoring. That said, GCC today is a lot easier to interop with

Doing a rewrite seems to me to always result in a cleaner codebase faster than the incremental refactoring. That said, GCC today is a lot easier to interop with than the GCC of pre-LLVM times. But, no amount of technical merit can save you when you don't have a free compiler anymore. Don't say Stallman didn't warn you, because he did, just like he warned you about all the other crap. Remember, when you're getting burned by this, that you chose to make snarky comments on the Internet instead of realizing what the moral path forward was and doing the ethical thing.