I guess it depends on how you look at the the percentages. Lots of people _use_ Apple’s developer tools, Google Chrome and other Google products. But in each o

I guess it depends on how you look at the the percentages. Lots of people _use_ Apple’s developer tools, Google Chrome and other Google products. But in each of those cases, I believe the actual group of people directly dealing with C++ and Clang are small relative to the global C/C++ developer population. Android has a strong argument since Google can force the hands of OEMs. I don’t see how the size of Chrome’s user base will bring about an LLVM monoculture if 99.999% of C++ developers on earth never build Chrome themselves. The majority of electronic devices on earth have (non-Android) firmware or software written in C/C++, written by people all over the world who don’t work for Google, Apple or anyone you’d even consider a tech company. You will never hear about these projects on HN because they’re closed-source, proprietary and (frankly) boring. But almost all of those projects use whatever toolchain their vendor provides, and more often than not (in my experience), thats GCC. Like I said, I don’t have any numbers to back this up. I’m not claiming that GCC reigns supreme and that LLVM is irrelevant outside of academia. I’m just saying that if you’re really concerned about LLVM _support_ in the kernel leading to an LLVM monoculture, you might not understand how widely used GCC is in “boring” tech. [edit] Adding to this, I guess it also depends on how you view a “monoculture” w.r.t compilers. I could imagine a not-too-distant future where LLVM gets the vast majority of research effort, and you see cool new optimizations brought into it while GCC stagnates. We’re arguably already there. But I don’t see that driving thousands of low-margin hardware OEMs to switch over from GCC to LLVM. Maybe that will happen one day, but I think we’re pretty far away from that.