Why does this person have such negative views of GCC and positive bias towards LLVM?
LLVM has a lot of problems, but it feels significantly more modern.
I do wish we had a "new LLVM" doing to LLVM what it did to gcc. Just because it's better doesn't mean it's perfect.
Basically, you can respect history while also being honest about the current state of things. But also, doing so requires you to care primarily about things like ease of use, rather than things like licenses. For some people, they care about licenses first, usability second.
And as a bonus, seems to me a nailed down IR actually is that portable assembly language the C people keep telling us is what they wanted. Most of them don't actually want that and won't thank you - but if even 1% of the "I need a portable assembler" crowd actually did want a portable assembler they're a large volume of customers from day one.
If you're ignoring the API and writing IR directly there are advantages to LLVM though.
Immature to the point of alienating.
also, gcc is relatively old and comes with a lot of baggage. LLVM is sort of the defacto standard now with improvements in performance
Distributions, and therefore virtually all the software used by a distribution user, still generally use gcc. LLVM is only the de facto standard when doing something new, and for JIT.
From what I gathered, LLVM has a lot of C++ specific design choices in its IR language anyway. I think I'd count that as baggage.
I personally don't think one is better than the other. Sometimes clang produces faster code, sometimes gcc. I haven't really dealt with compiler bugs from either. They compile my projects at the same speed. Clang is better at certain analyses, gcc better at certain others.