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Be wary of the optical illusion of the hype cycle, if you base yourself on HN's frontpage you'd think that Rust is more important than C++. In my experience GCC

by simias 8y ago

Be wary of the optical illusion of the hype cycle, if you base yourself on HN's frontpage you'd think that Rust is more important than C++. In my experience GCC is still the default C and C++ compiler on Linux in most of the industry. If it ain't broke, why change it? Even though I still use GCC to build by C code I'm very happy that LLVM exists, it brought some new blood and much needed competition to the FLOSS compiler scene. It also gave a better architecture to build on if you want to create a new language, it's great that a language like Rust for instance can generate such good machine code by building on top of the LLVM backend. In the GCC-only days the easiest way to create a new compiled language was to emit C as an intermediary target...

haeffin 8y ago
Depends on what your industry is. If you're compiling c++ for mobile, clang is pretty much your only choice for iOS and the default choice for Android ...
- IshKebab 8y ago
  And the default on OSX.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    ... and indeed on several of the BSDs. It has been the default compiler in base on FreeBSD since version 10, and FreeBSD is now built with it. There was also a push back around 2014 or so to get much of the ports tree built with it, too. DragonFly BSD has been buildable with clang since around 2014, albeit using clang from packages/ports. In 2017 (release 50) the DragonFly people started work on pulling it into base. OpenBSD switched building on x86/amd64 to clang in 2017 and building on armv7 to clang in 2018. NetBSD has included clang in base but as far as I know does not (yet) build with it by default on any architecture.
    - simias 8y ago
      I only mentioned Linux because I knew that my argument wouldn't work for BSDs! But in my defense the situation, at least originally, was more political than technical (at least as far as FreeBSD was concerned, I don't follow the other BSDs too closely). GCC switching to the GPLv3 was a big no-no for many people in the BSD world. As a result they were at the forefront to port the system to clang since they were stuck with an obsolete GPLv2 GCC version.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Correction, the only choice on Android as of NDK 18.

by simias 8y ago

haeffin 8y ago

Depends on what your industry is. If you're compiling c++ for mobile, clang is pretty much your only choice for iOS and the default choice for Android ...

IshKebab 8y ago
And the default on OSX.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  ... and indeed on several of the BSDs. It has been the default compiler in base on FreeBSD since version 10, and FreeBSD is now built with it. There was also a push back around 2014 or so to get much of the ports tree built with it, too. DragonFly BSD has been buildable with clang since around 2014, albeit using clang from packages/ports. In 2017 (release 50) the DragonFly people started work on pulling it into base. OpenBSD switched building on x86/amd64 to clang in 2017 and building on armv7 to clang in 2018. NetBSD has included clang in base but as far as I know does not (yet) build with it by default on any architecture.
  - simias 8y ago
    I only mentioned Linux because I knew that my argument wouldn't work for BSDs! But in my defense the situation, at least originally, was more political than technical (at least as far as FreeBSD was concerned, I don't follow the other BSDs too closely). GCC switching to the GPLv3 was a big no-no for many people in the BSD world. As a result they were at the forefront to port the system to clang since they were stuck with an obsolete GPLv2 GCC version.
pjmlp 8y ago
Correction, the only choice on Android as of NDK 18.