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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)."
Libertarians love to pine for a sort of Mad Max style of anarchy believing themsleves to be on the top of the food chain. The truth is that they will be the first ones to be run down by the road gangs or crushed into green crackers when the time comes.
They're mostly peasants that like to think they're robber barons.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's not relevant how many use OS X for server tasks, because that isn't Apple's target market. Apple's XNU kernel is a mix of Mach and monolithic kernel features hand-tuned specifically for typical end-users. You can run certain kernel benchmarks and find that XNU is slower for certain things, but Apple isn't interested in working on them because it turns out they aren't useful benchmarks for the use cases they are aiming for, and I think that's a respectable position to take.
Besides, other factors contribute to performance bottlenecks, such as drivers. For example, Android isn't competitive with iOS when it comes to low-latency audio tasks even though Android is running on a server-class kernel like Linux and iOS is running XNU, a kernel whose performance you claim sucks. Like the other poster said, fretting over what kernel you're running just isn't all that relevant anymore given all the factors that ultimately contribute to a user's experience on a given platform.
The engineer giving the talk mentioned that GCC eventually got precompiled headers over a decade after he had asked Stallman for the feature and after NeXTStep had already invested significant work in creating DevKit to work around GCC's limitations. It was those kinds of political moves that drove Apple to initiate the Clang project once LLVM came along.