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There has been huge corporate involvement and investment in LLVM from its earliest days as anything beyond a research project. When Apple open-sourced Clang, o

There has been huge corporate involvement and investment in LLVM from its earliest days as anything beyond a research project. When Apple open-sourced Clang, or their C++ standard library implementation and contributed them to the LLVM project, was that something to be afraid of as well? It seems to have gone pretty well.

svnpenn 7y ago
Fair point, but Google is not Apple. Google has a history of railroading standards to suit their needs, to the point where the standard becomes "what Google is doing". See the Chrome project.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Uh... Firewire.
- flukus 7y ago
  Apple ignores standards in the first place and opts for a completely closed and proprietary ecosystem wherever possible (see vulkan support and many others). They're both out to screw you but at least google does a bit of romancing first.
- Conan_Kudo 7y ago
  There are plenty of examples on Apple's side, too. To name a few: Floppy disks. CDROM. USB. Firewire. WebKit.
omeid2 7y ago
Unfortunately, the good deeds does not protect from bad consequences. Google has shown little regard to standards and community, specially as of recent, based on their handling of the musl libc in fuchsia, libc++ in Android, Go the language and it's community, and the elephant in the room: Google Chrome. Google has a bad culture of forking things and breaking things for good business reasons which does not align with the community and people outside Google. The concerns around Google fucking things up with their influence is not unreasonable.
hermitdev 7y ago
I'm only a casual observer of LLVM, and have really only used tools such as clang-format. That said, I haven't observed Apple applying a heavy hand in regards to LLVM/Clang development. As a C++ developer, clang has been a god send, amd not just for Clang users. For a long while, they had the best error messages around. Actually truly pointing you to precisely where the error is and giving meaningful errors. For a long fucking time, C++ compilers gave really verbose, shitty error messages that took a whole other level of understanding to decipher, which really hindered novices from progressing. Clang put pressure on GCC and Visual Studio to up their game and produce useful errors during compilation. It was bad enough at one point, I used to present interview candidates with example code that failed to compile and the compiler output and ask the candidatea to fix the code (it was always a trivial mistake in the code involving templates, bit it'd generate a few screen fulls of errors). It wasnt my sole judge of whether I'd recommend them or not, but it was a good indicator of how well they understood the C++ environment and how to decipher compiler errors (sample program was less than 20 lines, but generated at least 3 screen full of errors due to template spewage).

svnpenn 7y ago

Fair point, but Google is not Apple. Google has a history of railroading standards to suit their needs, to the point where the standard becomes "what Google is doing". See the Chrome project.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Uh... Firewire.
flukus 7y ago
Apple ignores standards in the first place and opts for a completely closed and proprietary ecosystem wherever possible (see vulkan support and many others). They're both out to screw you but at least google does a bit of romancing first.
Conan_Kudo 7y ago
There are plenty of examples on Apple's side, too. To name a few: Floppy disks. CDROM. USB. Firewire. WebKit.

omeid2 7y ago

Unfortunately, the good deeds does not protect from bad consequences. Google has shown little regard to standards and community, specially as of recent, based on their handling of the musl libc in fuchsia, libc++ in Android, Go the language and it's community, and the elephant in the room: Google Chrome. Google has a bad culture of forking things and breaking things for good business reasons which does not align with the community and people outside Google. The concerns around Google fucking things up with their influence is not unreasonable.

hermitdev 7y ago

I'm only a casual observer of LLVM, and have really only used tools such as clang-format. That said, I haven't observed Apple applying a heavy hand in regards to LLVM/Clang development. As a C++ developer, clang has been a god send, amd not just for Clang users. For a long while, they had the best error messages around. Actually truly pointing you to precisely where the error is and giving meaningful errors. For a long fucking time, C++ compilers gave really verbose, shitty error messages that took a whole other level of understanding to decipher, which really hindered novices from progressing. Clang put pressure on GCC and Visual Studio to up their game and produce useful errors during compilation. It was bad enough at one point, I used to present interview candidates with example code that failed to compile and the compiler output and ask the candidatea to fix the code (it was always a trivial mistake in the code involving templates, bit it'd generate a few screen fulls of errors). It wasnt my sole judge of whether I'd recommend them or not, but it was a good indicator of how well they understood the C++ environment and how to decipher compiler errors (sample program was less than 20 lines, but generated at least 3 screen full of errors due to template spewage).