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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Of course he wishes he had accepted the offer in hindsight, now that GCC is heading towards irrelevance (slowly, but it definitely is).

Doesn't mean he would have accepted it he had seen the message.

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A lot of languages are building alternative backends to llvm because it is so slow. How is it so clear that LLVM itself won’t be so relevant in future

What? GCC is absolutely no way whatsoever heading towards irrelevance. In embedded, deskop Linux, and server Linux, almost everything is built with GCC.

Yeah because everything was built with GCC when LLVM was first created and it hasn't displaced them all yet. It will though. All new languages use LLVM as a backend - nobody is using GCC. Every company that writes some kind of custom tooling (e.g. for AI) uses LLVM. Most compiler research is done on LLVM.

It will take a very long time (30 years maybe?) - I did say slowly - but the direction of travel is pretty clear.

LLVM is the playground for new languages and those that want to avoid GPL. But it is also a bloated mess. I personally prefer to invest my (limited) time into GCC, but actually hope that something new comes up. Or rather, that those big frameworks get decomposed into modular tooling around common standards and intermediate languages.

Yeah I agree it's a mess, but it's a mess that you can integrate with and augment fairly easily. There's definitely scope for a cleaner modern replacement (maybe written in Rust?). Absolutely enormous amount of work though so I won't hold my breath.

I hope for a Unix-like system written in C and a good C compiler toolbox. I would happily remove all the other nonsense - including Rust - from my life.

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