It's only a matter of time before llvm/clang overshadows gcc in every aspect, if it hasn't already. clang probably has 10x more full-time developers than gcc does.
I've been seeing this comment for the past 7-6 years, and GCC still delivers better performance on the majority of real-world programs I benchmark (mostly compression).
What I find very strange though is that some people seemingly want one of these projects to die.
As is evident from many of the replies in this thread, having two great compiler toolchains with which to test your code is a great advantage.
Secondly, looking at how GCC development picked up greatly when Clang/LLVM came on stage, it shows that GCC was stagnating with the lack of direct competition, should one of them disappear now, the same thing is likely to happen to the surviving project.
On the contrary, I would prefer having even more competition in this field.
I don't think people want, I think people are worried that this will happen. It's pretty clear that commercial backing largely favours LLVM for obvious reasons. A compiler monoculture nobody really wants back.
I'm not sure which side you were addressing here, so I'll cover both
Stallman wants the LLVM project to die for political reasons (he described it as "a terrible setback for our community" [1]). His argument is basically that LLVM can be used by non-free software, so it's mere existence is negative for the world because it enables non-free software. Also obviously it takes away resources that could have gone to improving GCC (although in my opinion a lot of them wouldn't for the reason below). It's an extreme argument, but it's the kind of extreme position Stallman has consistently taken so it's not surprising.
On the other side, one of the problems people have with GCC is that it's run by people who actively want to make worse software for political reasons. i.e. they'd rather software not support something at all if supporting it might benefit non-free software. That's fair enough, but it shouldn't be a surprise when users of the software prefer to use and support a project that isn't deliberately designed to make doing certain tasks very difficult. Academics and other people with an interest in hacking on compilers were obviously going to prefer a project that wasn't architected to try and prevent the very kinds of things they were doing.
The opposition to refactoring tools for emacs based on GCC is the most recent (2015) example of this[2], but the problem is a long standing one. Fundamentally people want to use compilers to do more sophisticated things with their code than just compile it, and that is seen as being incompatible with the political goals of the GCC project.
[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... and the rest of that thread
Well, for an end user those 'political' reasons are often practical benefits.
Having features only available as proprietary add-ons or through proprietary forks, or being locked out of running the code of your choice on hardware you've bought, are things I find very unappealing.
Of course there are downsides with copyleft as well, because there is no perfect solution to this problem.
Personally I'm favoring permissive licensing for projects where there is little or no incentive for commercial proprietary forks, and copyleft for projects where there is (typically end user targeted).
I wish they stop playing the political stand here since LLVM is being adopted more and more.
The free software community is more than ever before at risk of being replaced by a monopoly culture controlled by large corporations.
I wish people, particularly devs, thought more about licenses and their long term impact on freedom of the user & dev. I get tired of hearing about how "but copyleft is less free because it restricts me", but to me that's like saying "individual liberty under the rule of law is less free because it prevents me from punching that dude in the face". It's some strange form of anarchism argumentation that fails to respect the rights of others.
With all the security issues cropping up lately, I think it should be obvious to big picture thinkers that, while not the solution in itself, any real forward thinking solutions for cyber-security must focus on keeping black boxes out of the picture. BSD style licenses are dangerous to me because they allow hard working peoples code to be abused and used for abuse of others.
To be fair to this particular argument though, LLVM does fall under the LSCA license which is gpl compatible, it simple isn't copyleft, so my above rant is more a general comment than on the topic of clang.
If everything in computer software is copylefted, the status quo in the rest of the non-software economy persists.
Further, examples of AGPL 'free software' for the web backed by the dominant cloud service provider essentially give them an unlimited monopoly on that particular service, since, as copyright holder, they will be the only party able to create a proprietary fork which is better than the competition..
More philosophically:
The spirit of the law is always greater than the law itself..
If every free software project was copylefted, it would be effectively impossible for any company that is smaller than Apple to maintain everything they need to make software proprietary. Want font rendering? Reimplement libharfbuzz. Want to write any C program? Reimplement glibc. And so on.
> Further, examples of AGPL 'free software' for the web backed by the dominant cloud service provider essentially give them an unlimited monopoly on that particular service, since, as copyright holder, they will be the only party able to create a proprietary fork which is better than the competition..
Only if they have a CLA or don't accept any contributions. I can't think of any examples of such AGPL projects, but even with the GPL such projects are quite rare (and CLAs like the FSF actually don't allow them to create proprietary forks). You're just spreading FUD, please stop.
Why does it need to be proprietary in the first place though. I feel like the arguments I am hearing are making assumptions about the desired outcome to support their reasoning.
The purpose of the GPL was to encourage companies to publish their software under the GPL (want to use readline, got to use GPL). The long term goal was to create an environment where GPL software was so much better than the alternative that closed-source software would just whither.
This made sense in the 1980s. Remember that gnu was started when RMS found that he couldn't modify a program he needed - at the dawn of proprietary software.
This was a time when software writing was a small-scale operation (emacs was written by one? individual, Unix by two or three, etc.) and college students/professors could easily outnumber commercial software houses.
It actually worked for a while - gnu actually won a objective-C compiler purely due to the GPL.
Now, on the other hand, nowadays software companies are huge and have huge teams. Even without llvm's academic base, Apple would have enough cash to build it on their own.
Why make it easier for them? Very few companies can be like Apple (and even Apple didn't write everything from scratch). Compromising allows more companies to wrong their users, it's not helpful to treat companies like people -- without a profit motive most companies won't liberate their software.
Additionally, a lot of GPL software, like MySQL and BerkeleyDB, create a more closed community because that company has a lot more ability to create their own black box projects through dual licensing as closed source works. Postgres, in comparison, is BSD licensed, making it much harder for a company like Oracle to buy out pieces of the community and run away with the source and make deals others can't. The GPL has a lot less community power to counter those sorts of situations.
[1] http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/slides/Robinson-PS4Toolchain....
With BSD-style licenses, everyone is also on an equal footing, except that now users have no guarantees that the software they use will be maintained as free software. At any point, a treacherous developer or company could scoop up the talent from the community and make a maintained fork of the project proprietary. The original project dies because of lack of talent and now free software has helped expand the reach of proprietary software.
Note that even with copyright assignments, there are some good ones. The FSFs (optional for projects) copyright assignment has specific wording that guarantees they will always keep the code free (and even go further to state that it will always be copyleft and in keeping with their well-documented philosophy). If I had a single foundation I had to pick to assign my copyright to, it would be the FSF.
Going GPL also has drawbacks. Look at how Apache 2 and GPL 2 weren't compatible because of the Apache license's patent clause. That lock-in effect of the GPL means that your software package can't be used by the larger free software community. Which if you're satisfied with it, fine, but some people don't want to encumber their software as such. There's no such thing as a universal benefit.
I don't understand what this sentence means? Do you mean they take the developers and stop them from working on the original GPL version? In this context I'm referring to the most common case which is a GPL project that has more than one copyright holder.
In _that_ context is is not possible for a developer to take the existing work of the developers, make a proprietary fork, and convince the developers (in a moment of weakness) to switch and start working on the proprietary code. They can create a new project, but that's always true and not possible to restrict (nor would anyone want to).
> That lock-in effect of the GPL means that your software package can't be used by the larger free software community.
And this is the whole point of the "or any later version" clause. Every complaint you're bringing up has already been resolved by how the GPL is used and has worked for >20 years. Of course the GPL does have its downsides (the whole MPLv1/CDDL thing is a real shame) but "lock-in" is not one of them (unless you explicitly decide to lock yourself in, which is your own fault).
I'm referring to the GPL's "no other restrictions" clauses that keeps things from interoperating with the Eclipse public license for IBM wanting to maintain choice of venue, the MPL, CDDL, 4-clause BSD, etc. Each of which the FSF says, "well, if they just used our license." The GPL is absolutely a barrier to cooperation.
In contrast, Linux does not and GCC's FSF copyright assignment includes a promise that the software will remain free.
Where can I download the source code for the specific version of clang used in OSX?
(AFAIK, it is unavailable, which has been a bummer in chasing bugs which show up only in it)
https://opensource.apple.com/release/developer-tools-81.html for example.
Sometimes takes a while to show the latest version though.
As a dumb example, the Open Watcom license is an "open source" license but is not a free software license because it is too restrictive. In the Open Watcom instance, the OSD does not protect the freedom for users to have private copies of software, the four freedoms do (or at least the modern interpretation does).
There's also the whole TiVo thing, where the modern interpretation of freedom 0 is restricted by DRM while "open source" software does not have any problems with DRM restricting users.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
In addition to GCC/clang and Firefox/Chrome already mentioned, think Microsoft/Apple, Intel/AMD, nvidia/AMD, Boeing/Airbus, Playstation/XBOX...