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Comment by X-Istence | Hacker News Reader

I have been using clang for just over a year now and I have found that without it I start going insane. It is by far my favourite compiler. The error messages it spits out are sane (compared to those of GCC) and help me track down the problem faster and with less effort. It definitely has made me a very happy man!

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Does anyone have a clue as to why GCC's messages have remained so bad for so long?

gcc's error messages, especially for C++ templates, got much better in 4.5. They don't have pretty colors, but I didn't find a substantial benefit from clang 2.9's vs gcc 4.5's for C++ development when using both for a week.

Note that if you're on a Mac, your system's gcc is likely several years out of date.

Even with 4.5 I haven't found the error messages to be nearly as helpful. Also with clang you can easily turn on a way to look for undefined behavior and turn those into warnings/errors which is fantastic and helped me track down a bug BEFORE it caused me huge grief.

> Note that if you're on a Mac, your system's gcc is likely several years out of date.

To be precise: Apple stopped maintaining its GCC branch after the switch to GPL3. The last version available with Apple patches is 4.2.1. There will be no further updates to this branch.

Check out [Colorgcc](http://schlueters.de/colorgcc.html). It helps more than you'd think.

Because it's hard to add it to the mature infrastructure that was not designed to support it from the beginning. Clang was built from ground up to support good diagnostics.

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