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> If the clang/LLVM people decide they want to eat GCC's lunch, they will do it They have about 5-10 architectures and about 40-50 architecture variants to cat
by _pmf_ 12y ago
> If the clang/LLVM people decide they want to eat GCC's lunch, they will do it
They have about 5-10 architectures and about 40-50 architecture variants to catch up to GCC. It's doable, but it will take about the time it took GCC to get there, and the result will be that LLVM becomes the kind of unmaintainable mess that GCC is considered to be now.
One would assume that the author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" would know a bit or two about the lifecycle of open source software.
- hga 12y agoAs I understand it, the counter arguments are: Not all of those architectures and variants are important going forward (I'd actually be very interested in lists of them). GCC was designed for and has been thoroughly maintained to be less maintainable (one of the major points of these recent prominent debates). C++ is more maintainable than C. (I don't know that I buy this at all, in fact, I'm about to dive into LLVM's source code to see if it could possibly prompt me to revoke my oath to never program in C++ and Perl again unless absolutely necessary :-). The last two, plus LLVM's Bazaar model of development in part enabled by those technological differences, means it won't be an unmaintainable mess if and when it grows out like that. I have no idea if this will be true. I'd like to hear from seasoned developers who are also seriously familiar with the LLVM architecture, development model and code base (per the above, I rather hope I won't become one of the latter).