I just wanted to let you know that after installing Xcode 5, g++ is actually pointing to Clang. Last time I tried to compile DMD with Clang all tests didn't pass.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Sunday, 27 October 2013 at 10:36:56 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> I just wanted to let you know that after installing Xcode 5, g++ is actually pointing to Clang. Last time I tried to compile DMD with Clang all tests didn't pass.

Same with gcc. It's really annoying that when you install the gnu
tools you have to change the symlinks yourself. I guess apple
prefers the clang tools.

genuine question: is there any advantage of gcc over llvm ? Betting over clang/llvm/lldb seems to make more sense.



On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 3:57 AM, Gary Willoughby <dev@nomad.so> wrote:

> On Sunday, 27 October 2013 at 10:36:56 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>
>> I just wanted to let you know that after installing Xcode 5, g++ is actually pointing to Clang. Last time I tried to compile DMD with Clang all tests didn't pass.
>>
>
> Same with gcc. It's really annoying that when you install the gnu tools you have to change the symlinks yourself. I guess apple prefers the clang tools.
>

On 2013-10-28 00:52, Timothee Cour wrote:
> genuine question: is there any advantage of gcc over llvm ?
> Betting over clang/llvm/lldb seems to make more sense.

No, I don't see any advantage. Although I don't like that Apple silently changes what gcc/g++ is.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Monday, 28 October 2013 at 08:02:45 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> No, I don't see any advantage. Although I don't like that Apple silently changes what gcc/g++ is.

They are trying to phase out GCC altogether, as they are stuck with an ancient version due to licensing issues (GPLv3).

The Clang driver was specifically engineered to be a drop-in replacement for GCC, so given that many Makefiles are hard-coded to use "gcc" or "g++", I think what they are doing makes sense.

David

On 2013-10-28 09:40, David Nadlinger wrote:

> They are trying to phase out GCC altogether, as they are stuck with an
> ancient version due to licensing issues (GPLv3).
>
> The Clang driver was specifically engineered to be a drop-in replacement
> for GCC, so given that many Makefiles are hard-coded to use "gcc" or
> "g++", I think what they are doing makes sense.

I know the story, doesn't mean I like it. I like that they're changing to the LLVM tool chain, but not they way they're doing it. Apparently some tests fails when DMD is compiled with Clang.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 28/10/13 00:52, Timothee Cour wrote:
> genuine question: is there any advantage of gcc over llvm ?

For Apple, probably not.  But GCC supports a much, much wider set of architectures than LLVM.

On Monday, 28 October 2013 at 12:39:53 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 28/10/13 00:52, Timothee Cour wrote:
>> genuine question: is there any advantage of gcc over llvm ?
>
> For Apple, probably not.  But GCC supports a much, much wider set of architectures than LLVM.

sure, but i would prefer LLVM license over GCC if i were in Apple dev team(and that what they did). also LLVM is quite young, so who knows what people contribute to it in near future...

On 28/10/13 14:22, evilrat wrote:
> sure, but i would prefer LLVM license over GCC if i were in Apple dev team(and
> that what they did). also LLVM is quite young, so who knows what people
> contribute to it in near future...

Surely, but we should have sympathy for Apple's desire to be able to exert proprietary control over their products because ... ? :-)

Don't get me wrong, LLVM itself is a fantastic project, and as long as people contribute great code to great free software projects I don't really mind what their motivation is, but if Apple's goal is to avoid the patent-related provisions of GPLv3, we could be in for a nasty surprise at some point in the future if compiler-related patents Apple holds become part of the battleground of the computing market.

From a purely technical point of view, Apple doesn't need a compiler that supports a wide range of platforms, so GCC's much broader range of hardware support is irrelevant to it.  But it's an advantage GCC continues to have in the bigger picture.

On Monday, 28 October 2013 at 15:49:41 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 28/10/13 14:22, evilrat wrote:
>> sure, but i would prefer LLVM license over GCC if i were in Apple dev team(and
>> that what they did). also LLVM is quite young, so who knows what people
>> contribute to it in near future...
>
> Surely, but we should have sympathy for Apple's desire to be able to exert proprietary control over their products because ... ? :-)
Do you have any evidence that they've exerted "proprietary control" over llvm, say by adding closed modules to their compiler?

I actually talked to the head llvm guy at Apple about this possibility a couple years back and he was adamantly against anyone outside closing up parts of the compiler.  Of course, he may not get to make that decision at Apple and we can't know the truth unless we peek at the source for the shipping compiler at Apple, but I haven't seen any evidence that llvm isn't developed in the open.

Have you?

> Don't get me wrong, LLVM itself is a fantastic project, and as long as people contribute great code to great free software projects I don't really mind what their motivation is, but if Apple's goal is to avoid the patent-related provisions of GPLv3, we could be in for a nasty surprise at some point in the future if compiler-related patents Apple holds become part of the battleground of the computing market.
While I do not buy Apple products because of their odious patent stance, I highly doubt they would ever use such compiler patents, if they even have any.  Microsoft has a patent on continually scanning a document for spelling errors and highlighting them (http://www.google.com/patents/US5787451), yet _as far as we know_ (and according to a former Microsoft employee - http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=1548), they've never asserted it on the dozens of applications with such spell-checking in their text editing controls, including this Chrome browser tab I'm currently typing into.

I agree that it is a problem that Apple doesn't do a patent grant for their open source projects, assuming they even have any compiler or other software patents on them, but I'm skeptical they'd ever enforce those anyway.  Also, IANAL, but I believe they'd never be able to extract any money from such a lawsuit anyway, since they don't make any money from clang or Safari and give them away for free.

> From a purely technical point of view, Apple doesn't need a compiler that supports a wide range of platforms, so GCC's much broader range of hardware support is irrelevant to it.  But it's an advantage GCC continues to have in the bigger picture.
Sure.