The code quaity of GCC leaves much to be desired. Their mailing list has some figures from Coverity, where the defect rate in 2017 was at 1.67 defects per thousand lines of code for their 2.5 million lines versus 0.62 defects in LLVM per thousand lines of code for LLVM's 5.1 million lines:

https://inbox.sourceware.org/gcc/793886b8-2fd8-e593-f065-239...

At present, GCC is at 1.60 defects and LLVM is at 0.76. LLVM was at 0.32 in July, but it jumped to 0.76 in August around the time it would have branched to start LLVM 16 development and has stayed there since then.

GCC has a policy of hiding its coverity data contrary to the spirit of open source, so I have not been able to see its historical data. I could forking it on github and submit my own builds to coverity to see what the historical data likely was, but I do not see much reason to do that beyond knowing the current state is a mess.

Anyway, I felt like expanding on your GCC remark, since it is a pile of bad code that is definitely holding back OSS and the industry.