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You can look at this from other side: the fact that Clang was created and is quite popular tells that GCC had enough problems to warrant its creation.

by rimliu 9y ago

pavlov 9y ago
Is there any major software project that doesn’t get competition after 20 years? (Counting from gcc’s release to clang’s launch.) This industry is constantly reinventing. Clang takes a different tack in both licensing and implementation, and that’s great for everyone.
- rimliu 9y ago
  It depends if you are talking only about open source or all projects. In the latter case I'd say Photshop still has no competition. There are alternatives for some subtasks (photo editing for web), but for print work nothing comes even close, afaik.
  - eru 9y ago
    The Bloomberg terminal also enjoys an enviable moat these days. But that's mostly network effects.
- pmontra 9y ago
  Gcc had competition in the form of proprietary compilers from hardware manufacturers. I remember I used the HP compiler on HPUX machines at university (8xx series?) We were using gcc most of the time, can't remember why.
johannes1234321 9y ago
While clang's creation doesn't root only n the fact of "wrong" engineering, but of different goals and politics. For the later: An important driver in clang are Apple and BSD communities who don't want to have GNU software (especially GPLv3) in their systems. Also parts of gcc's architecture are created for political reasons to make it harder to decouple, while clang's primary design was to build a library which understands C/C++ and also can be used as a compiler. The purely technical arguments (i.e. gcc has bad diagnostics and clang gives better errors) are minor (gcc, due to the competition, became way better, if equal time would have gone to gcc instead of clang it might be even better) All that said: I really love this cooperative competition which benefits everybody, where you have different options try out ideas and where for large parts contributors discuss ideas between competing solutions.
- dwc 9y ago
  > parts of gcc's architecture are created for political reasons to make it harder to decouple This was a major, long standing gripe about GCC, and it materially affected its quality and usability. This was not an orthogonal matter: bad technical decisions were made in the interest of political goals. > if equal time would have gone to gcc instead of clang it might be even better I don't think so. GCC's position as the de facto choice for a free/open compiler, coupled with some of the political/organizational decisions of the project, made it easy for developers to say "it's good enough!" on such things. Viable competition is one of the few things that will shake a team out of that.

You can look at this from other side: the fact that Clang was created and is quite popular tells that GCC had enough problems to warrant its creation.

by rimliu 9y ago

You can look at this from other side: the fact that Clang was created and is quite popular tells that GCC had enough problems to warrant its creation.

pavlov 9y ago

Is there any major software project that doesn’t get competition after 20 years? (Counting from gcc’s release to clang’s launch.) This industry is constantly reinventing. Clang takes a different tack in both licensing and implementation, and that’s great for everyone.

rimliu 9y ago
It depends if you are talking only about open source or all projects. In the latter case I'd say Photshop still has no competition. There are alternatives for some subtasks (photo editing for web), but for print work nothing comes even close, afaik.
- eru 9y ago
  The Bloomberg terminal also enjoys an enviable moat these days. But that's mostly network effects.
pmontra 9y ago
Gcc had competition in the form of proprietary compilers from hardware manufacturers. I remember I used the HP compiler on HPUX machines at university (8xx series?) We were using gcc most of the time, can't remember why.

johannes1234321 9y ago

While clang's creation doesn't root only n the fact of "wrong" engineering, but of different goals and politics. For the later: An important driver in clang are Apple and BSD communities who don't want to have GNU software (especially GPLv3) in their systems. Also parts of gcc's architecture are created for political reasons to make it harder to decouple, while clang's primary design was to build a library which understands C/C++ and also can be used as a compiler. The purely technical arguments (i.e. gcc has bad diagnostics and clang gives better errors) are minor (gcc, due to the competition, became way better, if equal time would have gone to gcc instead of clang it might be even better) All that said: I really love this cooperative competition which benefits everybody, where you have different options try out ideas and where for large parts contributors discuss ideas between competing solutions.

dwc 9y ago
> parts of gcc's architecture are created for political reasons to make it harder to decouple This was a major, long standing gripe about GCC, and it materially affected its quality and usability. This was not an orthogonal matter: bad technical decisions were made in the interest of political goals. > if equal time would have gone to gcc instead of clang it might be even better I don't think so. GCC's position as the de facto choice for a free/open compiler, coupled with some of the political/organizational decisions of the project, made it easy for developers to say "it's good enough!" on such things. Viable competition is one of the few things that will shake a team out of that.