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Comment by ianstallings | Hacker News Reader

Related topic, LLVM vs GCC performance: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=llvm_clan...

I guess if it's a big deal you can always compile gcc. Honestly I'd rather have it compiled for me but that's probably no surprise.

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Right, but there are license concerns (gpl3) impacting inclusion of gcc > 4.2 for many of the BSDs. FreeBSD is still using gcc-4.2 I believe.

Seemes kind of odd to fixate on a self-contained copyright license (The license of GCC doesn't impact the code compiled with it) while at the same time the LLVM/Clang contributors are not required to release their patents for use, and some (many?) of them are filing patents on techniques they use in LLVM.

To me it seems that they are ignoring an important practical concern (usage of LLVM/Clang may be unlawful in the US and Europe without going out and obtaining patent licenses) in order to address a purely philosophical issue with no practical impact.

It's sort of amusing how the tables have turned over the last twenty years. Twenty years ago it was the FSF/GNU crowd who was making impractical decisions for philosophical/political reasons. ... and as time has gone on the practical importance of strongly free software has become greater and greater.

I always had the notion that LLVM is faster than GCC. I don't feel qualified to interpret this benchmark comparison, but they appear to have roughly the same performance?

LLVM compiles faster than GCC (although the gap has narrowed in the last couple of years). GCC produces faster code than LLVM (although that gap has also narrowed)

LLVM compiles faster as it optimises less (oversimplified of course).

This recent presentation from the 2013 European LLVM Conference outlines the optimization issues LLVM still suffers from, making the produced binaries up to ~10% slower than with GCC for some use cases:

http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-04/#talk3

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