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GCC 4.9 To See Significant Upgrades In 2014
noahfecks writes "It seems that the GCC developers are taking steps to roll out significant improvements after CLANG became more competitive. 'Among the highlights to look forward to right now with GCC 4.9 are: The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer has been ported to GCC; Ada and Fortran have seen upgrades; Improved C++14 support; RX100, RX200, and RX600 processor support; and Intel Silvermont hardware support.'"
No. C++ in particular has resumed the rapid evolution it enjoyed long ago and GCC needs to keep up.
Because since 4.6, gcc has severe stability problems? The only version that can compile more complicated C++11 reliably is 4.7.3 -- earlier versions (4.6.x in particular) have a strong tendency to ICE (including segfaults). And 4.8.0 has a performance regression where some files compile multiple hours instead of a few minutes. I have to check with 4.8.2 (I really really hope it works, because clang -- and especially libc++ -- is not as universally available yet).
A lot of generalized software are simple in theory. Until you factor in real world designs, like optimization, handling multiple platforms and architectures, maintainability, stability . . . .
Making something like the GCC is not simple.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
No Apple is pushing CLANG for exactly the reason that they want to use BSD license in a take not give fashion...how hackable is it; Xcode(SDK) will only work on Mac OS X. Looking forward to proprietary extensions :)
Huh? Apple is putting a lot of work in llvm (the general compiler framework), and they give that work away under the BSD license. They are most certainly not only taking, they are also giving a lot. llvm is highly portable, and is certainly not restricted to Mac OS X (or C/C++ compilation, for that matter). In fact, lots of BSD distributions (and Minix) use llvm as their compiler of choice, because they don't want GPLed software. Similarly, clang (the c/c++ compiler on top of llvm) is highly portable, under a BSD license, and Apple is putting a lot of work in it. Moreover, Apple is eating its own dog food, and using llvm/clang to compile most of Mac OS X, which is a solid guarantee for the quality of the resulting compiler, and is therefore another highly significant contribution.
It is true that Xcode (the Integrated Development Environment (IDE)) is not free, but that does not diminish the contributions that Apple is making to llvm and clang.
Apple created and owns clang. If they wanted to stop distributing the source, they could do so no matter if it were GPL and BSD licensed. It's theirs to do what they want with.
They're giving it all away for free with zero obligation to do so, and all you can do is criticise them for somehow still not giving enough?
As far as C++(11,14) goes, clang is more mature, faster *and* it produces faster code (the last mainly due to libc++). I fail to see how is GCC keeping ahead, let alone comfortably. Also, clang is a self-hosting C++ compiler -- unlike gcc, which is written in C. That helps an awful lot.
PS: Getting a two-fold speedup when going from libstdc++ to libc++ (with STL-heavy code) is not unheard of. But yes, that's anecdotal. I don't have any good benchmarks, as far as anything like that even exists.
Apple "created" clang by hiring the LLVM creator. It was started in academia.
As the other guy says, Apple created clang from scratch. You are confusing it with LLVM, which is its backend.