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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

For once, I don't see what the big deal is. If anything, I think it surprising that Apple didn't fully excise GPL stuff long ago; as this blogger notes, it's not like they couldn't pull BSD components in.

> They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal.

I'm curious at both of these, albeit for different reasons. I'm pretty sure there are BSD-licensed smb stacks, so this doesn't strike me as a licensing issue so much as a "wanting to remove a component that they have no interest in" issue. And why was removing GCC inconvenient? Clang is a perfectly serviceable C compiler.

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Three facts: 1: clang was significantly worse when Apple removed GCC support, 2: clang is still significantly worse than GCC, and 3: it's because of Google's investment, not Apple's, that we can think of clang as a "in the same stadium" competitor to GCC that makes Apple's removal of GCC surprising.

Any pair of these wouldn't be surprising. Apple is investing in an unproven technology, ok fine. But the congruence of these three facts is surprising. Apple is investing in a worse technology and also relies entirely on Google to improve that technology for them. Blows my mind.

> clang is still significantly worse than GCC

On what basis is that a "fact" without further context? I'd say that very much depends on what you consider or measure.

The compile times are much longer and the generated code is usually slower except for autovectorized code.

I've spent a lot of time testing both clang and gcc, and right now the only part of clang I use regularly is the static analyzer in my continuous integration.

For C++ in particular, the compile times are 2-3 times as long. It's unbelievable how slow it is.

> 2: clang is still significantly worse than GCC

Do you have any sources/information to back that statement up?

Anecdote from someone who's not the parent: I have had issues with C++ compile times in Mac OS X for a long time. GCC compiles many things in almost half the time.

At least in the past, Apple has had significant contributions to LLVM. These days, that might be limited to the Swift stack.

They did replace Samba with their own SMB stack, and the new one was very buggy indeed, to the extent of "eats your data in normal usage when run against a contemporary Windows server".

Similarly, they replaced pcsc-lite (pcscd, which brokers hardware access, and libpcsc, which speaks to pcscd) with a proprietary implementation as there was no BSD-licensed alternative.

Clang has been getting better and better over time. Getting rid of GCC is a no-brainer now, but maybe not at the start of the decade.

Well: clang exists only because of the decision to get rid of GCC in the first place :)

Right, I think my point though is it wasn't really up to the task until a few years into the project. These days I would personally rate it better than GCC based on my experience.

GCC's relevance remains in that it still supports more platforms, or say, the Linux kernel still uses it.

If one needs GCC, they can install GCC. I don't get the insistence that "the tool I like should come in the default install." Not to mention, Apple would routinely let their installation languish at older versions of various utilities, necessitating upgrading via package manager.

Being 'inconvenienced' by the removal of GCC from the default install is exactly that: an inconvenience.

Not too much in the way of BSD licensed CIFS server stacks, at least last time I checked. Most of them are proprietary or GPL (or CDDL, in the case of Solaris').

"macOS, starting with Mac OS X Lion, has an Apple-developed SMB server implementation called SMBX."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_that_support_...

I know, I worked on it :) It's not open source though.

I was actually thinking of the CDDL one in ZFS when I made that comment:) Granted, technically not BSD-licensed, but not GPL and ... less copyleft, anyways.

I am wondering if Apple ever contribute anything back to the *BSD?

I don’t know about now, but they have done in the past, mainly in the guise of paid developers.

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