> 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 materiall

> 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.