Hacker News Reader

More than that; we ended up with a crippled Emacs. What could and should be a full-featured IDE built into a self-documenting programmable Lisp-derivative virtual machine is instead a continuation of the "good-enough" conglomeration of regexp-driven hacks that continues to drive new engineers to real and productive solutions produced by the likes of Microsoft.

https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/

> worse compiler

Last time I checked gcc binaries beat Clang performance wise.

performance is far from the only or most important measure of a compiler

"GCC has been designed specifically NOT to be extended."

Several extension mechanisms have been built out in the last few years, including plugins for intermediate passes of compilation, and a library to operate as a JIT.

I wonder if that would ever have happened had LLVM not existed.