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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on the other complaints? There are precious few first-tier C compilers in the world. In my experience gcc has the best track record of quality, frankly. In 15 years of more or less full time professional use, I've been bitten by precisely one compiler bug.

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Many complaints revolve around GCC's monolithic architecture. See the clang comparison page (http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html) for a decent overview.

clang should open the door for intelligent refactoring and analysis tools which aren't possible using the GCC codebase.

...and the fact that GCC's monolithic architecture was designed explicitly to make it difficult for separate processes to interact with it, access intermediary representations, or incrementally compile. Probably the best example of GPL wankery there is.

Really? Why would they do that?

If the front end and back end can be separated cleanly, then a company could put their proprietary compiler back end behind the GCC front end without violating the GPL. Stallman has always worried about things like this; his objections to virtual machines have a similar basis.

That sounds like the same strategies used by proprietary software companies who go through all sorts of loops to discourage uses that don't ideologically fit with them. Almost like Free's version of DRM.

Wow, and this is stated explicitly? Seems like cutting off the nose to spite the face. I guess ideology is more important than code quality to the FSF. They have every right to do it, of course, but as an outsider it seems counter-productive

Witness the saga of ECGS -- people had to fork GCC because the FSF refused to take patches from the community.

The FSF's concern was to have employees maintaining (and controlling the development of) the software and as far as they were concerned that was that.

[citation needed]

I've heard this in quite a few places, RMS once quoted the reason we have an objective-c compiler is because people like apple to open source it to due to the architecture of gcc wouldn't let it be separate.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542804

GCC 4.5 adds support for plugins that allow this sort of thing. Mozilla have been making use of it for quite a while already: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Dehydra

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