New LLVM Debugger Subproject Already Faster Than GDB

kthreadd writes "The LLVM project is now working on a debugger called LLDB that's already faster than GDB and could be a possible alternative in the future for C, C++, and Objective-C developers. With the ongoing success of Clang and other LLVM subprojects, are the days of GNU as the mainstream free and open development toolchain passé?" LLVM stands for Low Level Virtual Machine; Wikipedia as usual has a good explanation of the parent project.

Comments

Re:Depends...

[samkass]

Since it is under a BSD-esque license, LLVM itself is definitely a candidate for being the "mainstream free and open development toolchain"; but only if the majority of real-world support scenarios don't involve proprietary actors taking advantage of that fact.

Perhaps ironically, though, it is exactly that aspect of LLVM that has led to LLVM's accelerated development. Apple has been contributing vast resources to it, and it is quickly replacing the gcc toolchain in MacOS and iOS development. I'm quite sure that the BSD license played a large role in Apple's decision to go the LLVM route. Apple has been using it internally for years as a way to create CPU vs GPU agnostic graphics code that can run on the best available hardware, and probably wouldn't want to have had to release that aspect of their work under GPL rules.

Re:Success?

[mini me]

Apple uses the work of the project extensively in Xcode for OS X/iOS development. You might not have heard of it, but a lot of people have used it.

Re:Depends...

[LingNoi]

Intel's ICC compiler produces code that is more than 10% faster

You mean the same Intel compiler that detects if you're using an AMD processor and intentionally de-optimises your code? Yeah 10% faster*

* As long as you're using an Intel processor to compile.