LLVM is just a proprietary-able version of GCC. And thus compiler authors mostly focus on benchmarks while not caring about other metrics such as compilation speed, correctness and codebase quality / ease of contribution. There appears to be some tribal knowledge requirement to add a new target.
With all the hype and apple funding LLVM gets, it could have been better.
It isn't just that. It's also a compiler framework, somewhat usable as a library without being part of its codebase. And I really do mean somewhat usable; the LLVM experience for use as a library is not great, but it's wildly better than GCC's. I think that, not just the license, is a big part of what made LLVM successful.
The license was the biggest deal.
Sometimes in life it's better to be a bit heterodox, but have influence and leverage, than being alone on your high castle. GCC can be as open as it gets, but pushing people away in the name of freedom has actually only given reasons to the industry to move away from it, which is sad and could be avoided.
Sometimes in order to achieve your goals you must compromise or risk loosing the footing you already have, because you have close to zero chances of succeeding.
If RMS had compromised on GCC in the '00s, i.e. if GNU had spun off the C/C++/ObjC front end as a separate GPLv2-or-later library upon which something like clangd could have been made, Clang would have never existed. Yes, LLVM would have still been present, but as a special-case backend that used GCC as its frontend instead than its own, as they were planning to do since the beginning. All these improvements you talk about would have been done under the GPL, and not BSD licenses or proprietary. IDEs like Xcode and such would still be proprietary like they are nowadays, because there was a 0% chance of getting Apple or whomever to release them under the GPL.
It doesn't matter how much strong your moral principles are, or how much you value integrity. The world is definitely more pragmatic about software and values different things than RMS; while this might or might not be beneficial to our overall society, that's the way it is. Ignoring it is myopic, if it does not outright amount to shooting yourself in the foot.
The FSF is shooting themselves in the foot with the way they handle many of their projects today, GCC is no exception. Free software purity is a great goal and all, but what use is it when nobody uses it or it falls behind more permissively licenses projects.
If he could just stop being a zealot for a split second and actually tried to understand the situation, he could have maybe been able to foresee that Apple had the people, resources and will to reimplement a whole compiler infrastructure that could threaten GCC's dominance, but he neglected it (it famously didn't care about Apple's offer to merge LLVM into GCC under the GPL).
Sometimes even the best of intents are shadowed by people's inability to compromise.
Sometimes the hate for a license prevents people to grasp what is ahead of them.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sony-Tha...
or that:
There are some talks from Sony at LLVM meetings regarding those.
That PR from Apple has nothing to do with the bitcode reference I made.
I don't know, maybe other AMD users would like to get them?
>might provide clues how to bipass PS 4 security
>AMD users would like to get them
They got em:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sony-Tha...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-10-...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sony-LLV...
Why do i want ANY PS4 specific security feautures in the Compiler??
LLVM's license was certainly a factor, and I'd never suggest otherwise, but there were many other reasons that GCC couldn't help kick off a wave of language design and experimentation the way LLVM did.
GNU Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, BASIC and plenty of OEM derived ones were never part of GCC source tree.
I had to study GIMPLE and GCC integration as part of my compiler design studies back in the 90's, using those nice Walnut Creek CD-ROMs.