Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

> and is fast becoming the preferred C++ compiler for non-Windows platforms.

They wish. Microsoft still hates GNU.

It is, though. And Microsoft isn't alone in hating GNU - FreeBSD no longer ships with or uses GCC; the entire FreeBSD kernel and userland is built with Clang these days. And, of course, Apple's the one that started this whole stampede away from GCC in the first place. LLVM/Clang really and truly have hit GCC hard - and definitely for the best. Look at the improvements to GCC spurred by newer features in the Clang build toolchain.

EDIT:

In reply to davidgerard's comment below:

> I will not believe this falsifiable claim without numbers. FreeBSD has almost no users compared to Linux.

Non-Windows does not mean Linux.

And what falsifiable claim? They didn't say Clang is the most popular - they said it's becoming. But if that's really the game you want to play, then it's Linux that has almost no users compared to the number of iPhones/iPads/iWatches/MacBooks out there - Clang/LLVM-powered, each and every one of them.

There are several reasons why FreeBSD is ditching GCC, one of them is licensing. I am wondering what are the technical reasons though...

There was a Stack Exchange question answering exactly this question:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/49906/why-is-freebsd...

Another contributing factor may be momentum. Clang is easier to work with than GCC, and doesn't have the baggage of GCC, so more and more people and companies are starting to use it, fund it, and commit code to it. It's been improving in leaps and bounds, and still rapidly improving. It's only a matter of time before it's all around better than GCC.

> I am wondering what are the technical reasons though

This is based on fairly limited experience, but I believe it's simply a better toolset. LLDB was easier to work with for me. The error messages make things quicker to diagnose. I prefer the added verbosity for things like flags.

The reason why I perfer clang is better -and colored- error message output.

GP actually used falsifiable properly - meaning that the claim is testable (evidence could swing both ways). A non-falsifiable claim would just have to be taken on faith alone or rejected altogether

I will not believe this falsifiable claim without numbers. FreeBSD has almost no users compared to Linux.

Define "user". You're on the internet. The bits you're downloading are probably passing through devices somewhere in the path that run FreeBSD.

~30% of North American traffic is from Netflix, whose servers are FreeBSD.

Everyone is a FreeBSD user and they don't need to know it to for it to count. Nobody actually gives a shit about numbers of users sitting on FreeBSD desktops.

Unless you think of iOS and OS X as flavors of FreeBSD.

Isn't Darwin forked from BSD proper, instead of FreeBSD etc?

Mac OS X is separately accountable, and that's <i>entirely</i> because Apple hates GPLv3.

That's not correct. Apple needed technical things from a compiler that gcc could not feasibly do, and started moving things to LLVM before GPLv3 was released. Even if gcc had been relicensed under a permissive license such as BSD, Apple would have moved to LLVM and Clang.

A couple examples. Core Image needs an optimizing JIT compiler that can take a chain of image filters and turn it into a single efficient filter for execution on the GPU or CPU (whichever will be faster on the particular system for the particular effects). XCode needs to parse C/C++/Objective-C code in the editor and in the debugger.

What Apple needed for these things was a modular compiler system, designed to work as a compiler toolkit from which you can pick and choose the parts that you need for your particular needs. A compiler toolkit that is designed to be easy to interface with outside tools.

Gcc was explicitly designed to not be that. It was only competition from LLVM/Clang that forced some liberalization onto gcc.

Not much of a hate but rather protecting their IPs by avoiding licenses like GNU. They are not alone in this, most of the big companies are avoiding it. Some companies use it and hoping for not getting caught (VMWare). I still don't see hate here, MS is just smart enough to avoid these sort of situations.

Microsoft is on record as hating the GPL.

If that's changed it's not showing in their careful use of the (very fine) Apache license rather than the GPL.

Microsoft haters are on record as attributing all manner of emotions to Microsoft decision-making, but from a detached perspective it all seems fairly dispassionate, if sometimes overly aggressive.

Services for Unix was full of GPL stuff. They're not protecting anything they have any sane threat model on. It's Microsoft being Microsoft.

Were they in violation of GPL with anything? I can't find credible reference.

I know that they identified the USB/DVD tool and re-released it under GPL.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-admits-its-gpl-violat...

No, as far as I know they fulfilled all GPL obligations on the SFU stuff. And I know of no cases of Microsoft violating the GPL (and I would have heard if there were). Not wanting GPL is entirely "won't" rather than "can't".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com