FreeBSD 10 To Use Clang Compiler, Deprecate GCC

An anonymous reader writes "Shared in last quarter's FreeBSD status report are developer plans to have LLVM/Clang become the default compiler and to deprecate GCC. Clang can now build most packages and suit well for their BSD needs. They also plan to have a full BSD-licensed C++11 stack in FreeBSD 10." Says the article, too: "Some vendors have also been playing around with the idea of using Clang to build the Linux kernel (it's possible to do with certain kernel configurations, patches, and other headaches)."

Comments

What's wrong with GCC?

[jomcty]

What's wrong with GCC?

Re:What's wrong with GCC?

[Alex Belits]

And WHY would a company want to avoid GPL compiler, unless it intends to distribute a sabotaged version of the compiler?

Re:What's wrong with GCC?

[bonch]

After all these years of BSD code existing and thriving without issue, it's amazing that people still spread this kind of fearmongering despite the fact that this scenario has never come true.

The original code and its contributors don't magically disappear the moment a company makes a closed change. And if a company makes contributions it doesn't show anyone, you're free to make your own open contribution that competes with it. In fact, it's in company's best interests to rely on open contributions, because they don't want to waste time and manpower on, say, maintaining a compiler. This has proven to be the case with Clang. There hasn't been some evil proprietary fork that somehow ruined the world--and even if there was, people would just contribute free versions of the fork's features to the main tree. Companies are smart enough to know that this would happen and therefore realize that closed contributions of major features would be wasted effort.

Re:Code quality will suffer

[bonch]

I've heard positive and negative claims regarding this. Certainly, Apple thinks it's production-ready (I think it was Xcode 4.2 that they stopped shipping GCC). Do you have a link showing that generated code is significantly worse? Which versions were compared?

Re:in other words

[bonch]

One of the FreeBSD developers gave a talk about this. FreeBSD has commercial users, and the new GCC just wouldn't have been an option for them. The older license-compatible version still in FreeBSD wasn't receiving updates, and it was beginning to affect developers too greatly.

Whether this compiler switch is a good thing or not depends on how much you hate the idea of commercial vendors using open source. GCC's strictness is admiral from an ideological perspective, but certainly not from a practical one. It should be noted that even Linus Torvalds adheres to a more pragmatic worldview:

There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

It's pretty damning when Linus himself no longer refers to Linux as free software because he doesn't like the extremism of the free software movement. And why should he? He's an engineer, not a religious fundamentalist.

Re:deliberately obscured internals by Stallman et.

[dragisha]

Stallman and others deliberately fought having APIs, proper documentation and to allow plugins for all parts of the GCC toolchain, to keep control of the thing.

Mostly result of dispute with DEC SRC when GCC and parent FSF failed to enforce GPL on Modula-3. Moving target known as GCC internals has been problem ever since, mostly to "legitimate" GNU compiler developers.

LLVM, on the other hand, made ingenious move with standard and open IR. Overall modular design is another boon.

GCC was in blind alleys before. No real reason for them not to survive this one. Another EGC can happen, to pull GCC in future.

Gcc falls short on some technical merits

[perpenso]

... Which is hilarious because it is the BSD fundamentalists who are re-implementing huge projects just to avoid a license they don't like for no reason other than political correctness ...

Untrue. Gcc is handicapped by political decisions in it technical design. It intentionally does not allow "others" to plug into some "internals". "Internals" that would facilitate other tool builders, especially those creating a graphical integrated development environment.

LLVM/Clang doesn't come with such technical baggage. Its modular rather than monolithic. It is a newer code base that is far easier to work with, even gcc devs moan about the bloat/complexity of their code base. Nearly all long lived project reach a point where it is better to toss the legacy code out and start from scratch, gcc may have very well surpassed that point.

And on some platforms LLVM/Clang simply generates better code.

Re:Dropping the GPL ~= worse.

[arth1]

In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain. Furthermore, I can foresee vendors making incompatible changes to the code produced by CLang, subtle ABI breakage and the like. The upper levels will suffer too : vendor A's version will not be able to compile source code with vendor B's extensions and vice versa.

Hindsight is invariably more accurate than foresight. And in this case, hindsight tells us that there are plenty of non-GPL free packages that you use every day that haven't succumbed to either of your fears. In fact you use at least a couple of them when you read this.

This sounds like the 1980s/ealy 1990s all over again

That wouldn't be bad. The productivity per user has never been higher, and most of what we use now was invented then. I'd rather see that again that these modern days where ideas are scarce and productivity per user base at an all time low.

History

[TopSpin]

At the moment I write this there are 297 comments mostly debating the merits of LLVM/Clang vs. GCC. There is not one mention of EGCS.

Fifteen years ago GCC was forked. A group of people we're frustrated with GCC and its leadership because they had contributions to make and talent to offer that was not welcome. They called their fork EGCS.

Why are we doing this? It's become increasingly clear in the course of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and improvment [sic] over the years.

The GCC you use today is EGCS. A few years later EGCS was adopted as GCC 2.95 after the merits of EGCS became undeniable.

Looks like we've come full circle. The cool kids are off in the weeds making cool stuff. Better stuff, and the `Powers That Be' are not interested. The `needs' of the FSF today are no longer in sync with the `needs' of the developers of today.

The bottom line is that GCC as it is with it's leadership, code base and license agenda doesn't cut it for those who have the talent, motivation and capital to create a tool chain that does cut it. You don't get to impede that, however righteous you think you are.

Freedom. Deal with it.