GCC vs LLVM

Absolutely. LLVM exists because GCC is GPL; that's a feature not a bug.

Except llvm/clang, the future of compilers, was in response to GCC's GPL licensing.

How important was it to get support into gcc? llvm wouldn't have been enough?

I dont know if licensing was the only reason why GCC missed out on this market. Using parts of the compiler as a library to aid tool building, refactoring and analysis is one of those great ideas that seems obvious in retrospect. To the credit of LLVM's early authors they had a larger vision of what a compiler ought to be than other compilers at the time. I dont recall gcc or any of the other commercial compilers having this expansionary vision of a compiler stack back in the 2000s. Once LL

Why?We already have llvm as a c++ monster(hundreds or thousands of MBytes on my mac), witch is modular, and have a more permissive license.So you are going to risk the only advantages of gcc,(written in c and relatively small and stability), so you could copy the new kid on the block?If you are going to copy them, copy the more permissive license. It will give commercial companies like Apple the option to improve your software like they do with llvm(Apple hired llvm creator).

I don't even understand how you can point to LLVM as an example of this failing. GCC is still alive and well, and perfectly suited for the task it was always intended to fill. People that wanted a commercial C compiler always had the option to purchase one at-cost, GCC was intended as an alternative to that process, not the alternative. It may be hard to remember, but less than 50 years ago squabbles over compiler licensing was what most developers had to deal with.Respecti

Maybe you should be outraged by GCC's deliberate sandbagging and less deliberate stagnation that allowed LLVM to swoop in and be a legitimately more useful (if not "better") compiler.Stallman himself was largely responsible for GCC not exposing intermediate representation for analysis.https://www.re

Compiler licensing is not enough to supersede the BSDs' pragmatism. We've been using GCC for years.If you've had to maintain GCC for your platform -- or worse yet, tried to add even small improvements -- you'd understand why momentum is building to replace it.Not that switching to GPLv3 helped GCC any. That's one reason among many that Apple stopped GCC development and put their weight behind LLVM.

GCC vs LLVM. It isn’t the license.

Several engineers working on LLVM or Clang are paid by Google or Apple. The reasons these two companies are not funding GCC are political, not technical, otherwise I bet they would gladly fund both efforts, if only for the healthy emulation.