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I wouldn't be surprised if the folks at the project abandoned their branch of gcc in order not to be "tainted by association". There is a revulsion to C++ that

I wouldn't be surprised if the folks at the project abandoned their branch of gcc in order not to be "tainted by association". There is a revulsion to C++ that is close to the core to OpenBSD's philosophy. Perhaps pcc or clang will get more attention.

eru 14y ago
But isn't LLVM written in C++, too?
- kingmanaz 14y ago
  Thanks, I did not know that.
- Ralith 14y ago
  But if GCC is now C++ as well, then it removes what may have been the motivating characteristic to use it, when clang is for many purposes an otherwise better, more freely licensed, compiler.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
dmm 14y ago
The people in the OpenBSD project seem pretty happy with their toolchain. pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress. Making a really good c compiler is hard and I don't think they have the people or interest at this time. I don't think they would switch to clang. LLVM is also c++.
- kingmanaz 14y ago
  >pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress. That's a shame. PCC seemed an interesting alternative to gcc, though I do recall PCC's v1.0 "revival" coinciding with an April Fools day several years ago. Perhaps it always was to be taken as a joke. OpenBSD's simplicity in implementation is laudable. The less moving parts there are the less parts there are to break. It's the same philosophy that keeps me driving my 25-year old pickup.
- Someone 14y ago
  I am not sure they are happy. They have the C++ compiler written in C that they want, but: - they have to maintain their own gcc version (the last GPL2 one) - the licensing for clang and LLVM fits the BSDs better than the licensing for gcc. If they want to keep the ability to bootstrap from a C compiler, they should consider creating a good C backend (configurable with such things as the size of a long) for LLVM. That way, they could convert any C++ code (including clang and LLVM) to C, and thus bootstrap a C++ compiler on a system that only has a C compiler. Does anybody see problems with that approach?

eru 14y ago

But isn't LLVM written in C++, too?

kingmanaz 14y ago
Thanks, I did not know that.
Ralith 14y ago
But if GCC is now C++ as well, then it removes what may have been the motivating characteristic to use it, when clang is for many purposes an otherwise better, more freely licensed, compiler.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

dmm 14y ago

The people in the OpenBSD project seem pretty happy with their toolchain. pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress. Making a really good c compiler is hard and I don't think they have the people or interest at this time. I don't think they would switch to clang. LLVM is also c++.

kingmanaz 14y ago
>pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress. That's a shame. PCC seemed an interesting alternative to gcc, though I do recall PCC's v1.0 "revival" coinciding with an April Fools day several years ago. Perhaps it always was to be taken as a joke. OpenBSD's simplicity in implementation is laudable. The less moving parts there are the less parts there are to break. It's the same philosophy that keeps me driving my 25-year old pickup.
Someone 14y ago
I am not sure they are happy. They have the C++ compiler written in C that they want, but: - they have to maintain their own gcc version (the last GPL2 one) - the licensing for clang and LLVM fits the BSDs better than the licensing for gcc. If they want to keep the ability to bootstrap from a C compiler, they should consider creating a good C backend (configurable with such things as the size of a long) for LLVM. That way, they could convert any C++ code (including clang and LLVM) to C, and thus bootstrap a C++ compiler on a system that only has a C compiler. Does anybody see problems with that approach?