Clang - what is the story?

[Da Rock]

On 01/23/12 07:26, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 09:33:02PM +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
>> PCC is only a C compiler, and there is some C++ code (e.g. groff) in the base
>> system. The FreeBSD port is marked as i386 and amd64 only, even though other
>> architectures seem to be there in the PCC source.
> I had somehow forgotten there was anything in the base system written in
> C++.  That would probably account for the choice of Clang over PCC.
What part is that? I thought it had to be all c...
>> Personally I think it is a good thing to have different C compilers. In the
>> past I've installed pcc just to see if my programs compiled OK. Now I tend to
>> use clang for that. It does a great job of identifying programming errors.
> I have found it rather disconcerting for quite some time now that the
> open source development community -- normally quite clued in to the
> benefits of diversity and friendly, competitive collaboration for
> maintaining a strong software ecosystem with lots of high quality options
> -- has been so singularly overrun by a single C compiler (GCC),
> especially given the central importance of C to the development of the
> major open source OSes.  The problem was compounded by the increasingly
> byzantine design of GCC itself and the proliferation of ugly edge-cases
> that created.
>
> I was saddened as well to see that TenDRA had vanished, because I thought
> it brought some important perspective (somewhat unique to its development
> ideals) to the selection of available compilers, as do PCC, LLVM/Clang,
> and even the Small-C Compiler.
>
> I hope that even if nobody else makes it the "official" compiler of any
> language, AerieBSD remains an active project with PCC as part of its base
> system, and that MINIX3 establishes itself reasonably well with TACK, if
> only to ensure more than two viable C compiler options for members of
> major open source Unixy OS families.  Four is probably a good number,
> with a few less-central implementations floating around as well to
> explore the fringes.
>