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(llvm monoculture comments aside) I find it really interesting that llvm isn’t able to be used in a similar way and achieve similar speed gains for incremental debug builds. Especially since swift debug build times probably matter enough for Apple to want to have a similar fast path with an llvm tool chain

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Which is why they came up with SIL (Swift Intermediate Language), make use of their own bitcode extensions, and not everything that Apple does lands on upstream, thanks LLVM license.

> thanks LLVM license.

To be fair, gcc requires contributors to assign copyright to the FSF or dedicate their work into the public domain. Neither of which is required by the GPL's copyleft so if Apple used gcc, they could still make changes that can't be upstreamed due to gcc's policy.

Check how Steve Jobs was an happy fellow to contribute back Objective-C frontend to FSF, back in the early day of NeXT.

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