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Interesting point about the virtualization. MANY companies are scared of GPL, for certain. Thinking about Clang, its better design didn't evolve in a vacuum. C

Interesting point about the virtualization. MANY companies are scared of GPL, for certain. Thinking about Clang, its better design didn't evolve in a vacuum. Clang was primarily developed by Apple [1] so that they would have (with LLVM) a full compiler toolchain that didn't include GPL code (and as others have mentioned, Clang is designed to integrate with editors for parsing, while GCC is explicitly designed to be HARD to integrate that way so that it can't be snuck into a proprietary project). YOUR choice to change to Clang may not have been about licensing, but licensing and design choices in support of that license philosophy are what caused Clang to exist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

nickpsecurity 11y ago
My choice was about licensing and design but 90+% design given GCC was a pain to work with. Your link shows two paragraphs of text talking about design issues with one sentence on licensing. So, it seems Apple's justifications were more similar to my own than different. The best part is that so many have jumped on the LLVM bandwagon. There's even a formal semantics to get formal verification work going. Mainstream coders, tool developers, and high assurance people all under the same roof contributing a bit to the same tool. Lots of potential there.
wooger 11y ago
This gives the worrying possibiltiy that Apple can benefit from an open source Clang and LLVM now, and in future can make thecomponents required to compile code to their platforms (mainly thinking iOS) proprietary. They're already moving to encourage / require iOS devs to ship them LLVM IR code - the most logical reason for this is so that they can keep the last part of compilation entirely proprietary in future, taking further freedoms from users and developers. They design and fab their own ARM chips already, so this is plausible.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  They also of course did the opposite with Swift - created a proprietary front end.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Exactly. They did that sort of thing with Mac OS and iOS on Darwin. They're doing it with Clang. They always do it. It's how they make billions of dollars. Not sure why you worry whether a particular company might scheme: simply don't buy their stuff. See how that works? And despite Google's BS, I have plenty of ways to keep Android devices largely under my control. On that side of the fence, people stopped worrying and started modding en masse. :) Further, mobile security vendors such as OK Labs w/ OKL4 let us isolate that mess while programming directly on the kernel or a custom runtime (think MirageOS for mobile). So, we have plenty of options because we aligned with a company doing open-source mobile with little lock-in. Align with closed-source and lock-in loving companies then you get what you had coming. ;)

nickpsecurity 11y ago

My choice was about licensing and design but 90+% design given GCC was a pain to work with. Your link shows two paragraphs of text talking about design issues with one sentence on licensing. So, it seems Apple's justifications were more similar to my own than different. The best part is that so many have jumped on the LLVM bandwagon. There's even a formal semantics to get formal verification work going. Mainstream coders, tool developers, and high assurance people all under the same roof contributing a bit to the same tool. Lots of potential there.

wooger 11y ago

This gives the worrying possibiltiy that Apple can benefit from an open source Clang and LLVM now, and in future can make thecomponents required to compile code to their platforms (mainly thinking iOS) proprietary. They're already moving to encourage / require iOS devs to ship them LLVM IR code - the most logical reason for this is so that they can keep the last part of compilation entirely proprietary in future, taking further freedoms from users and developers. They design and fab their own ARM chips already, so this is plausible.

TD-Linux 11y ago
They also of course did the opposite with Swift - created a proprietary front end.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Exactly. They did that sort of thing with Mac OS and iOS on Darwin. They're doing it with Clang. They always do it. It's how they make billions of dollars. Not sure why you worry whether a particular company might scheme: simply don't buy their stuff. See how that works? And despite Google's BS, I have plenty of ways to keep Android devices largely under my control. On that side of the fence, people stopped worrying and started modding en masse. :) Further, mobile security vendors such as OK Labs w/ OKL4 let us isolate that mess while programming directly on the kernel or a custom runtime (think MirageOS for mobile). So, we have plenty of options because we aligned with a company doing open-source mobile with little lock-in. Align with closed-source and lock-in loving companies then you get what you had coming. ;)