

Clang: Defending C++ from Murphy's Million Monkeys - chmike
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Clang-Defending-C-from-Murphy-s-Million-Monkeys

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roquin
As a reference, this video was posted 3 weeks ago with another title in
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3565400>. But almost receive no upvote.

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loup-vaillant
Yeah, you need some luck to make it to the front page. If I recall correctly,
one vote can be enough, but it has to be done soon after submission time.

Once you get past that threshold, karma skyrockets.

~~~
alecco
It gets worse because not many "interesting" people dedicate some time to
/newest. I used to go there once every day. The main problem is HN doesn't
discriminate by topic combined with lack of downvote. The noise to signal
ratio is too high. There are way too many spam, blogspam and metoo articles
against a few actual interesting submissions. And most times a blogspam
article gets to the frontpage instead of the original source. It's a shame.

In reddit the people doing the honorable job of upvoting new stories are
called "Knights of New". This effect is notable on good communities like
/r/programming. Trash submissions quickly get downvoted.

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X-Istence
I have been using clang for just over a year now and I have found that without
it I start going insane. It is by far my favourite compiler. The error
messages it spits out are sane (compared to those of GCC) and help me track
down the problem faster and with less effort. It definitely has made me a very
happy man!

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rrreese
Does anyone have a clue as to why GCC's messages have remained so bad for so
long?

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alec
gcc's error messages, especially for C++ templates, got much better in 4.5.
They don't have pretty colors, but I didn't find a substantial benefit from
clang 2.9's vs gcc 4.5's for C++ development when using both for a week.

Note that if you're on a Mac, your system's gcc is likely several years out of
date.

~~~
Hemospectrum
> Note that if you're on a Mac, your system's gcc is likely several years out
> of date.

To be precise: Apple stopped maintaining its GCC branch after the switch to
GPL3. The last version available with Apple patches is 4.2.1. There will be no
further updates to this branch.

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double051
I use Clang everyday and the error messages, warning messages, and static
analysis are really great to work with.

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alecco
Good talk minus the bashing of GCC and Stallman. It's a free product you don't
need to use it and you're not entitled to anything as the license clearly
states. The speaker pretends to be against open source politics but doesn't
state his bias since both Apple and Google have corporate interests to
undermine GPL compiler tools.

On the other hand, I really like the competition. It's very healthy to have
options.

~~~
wisty
If clang takes off, GCC will take a lot more bashing, simply because
meaningless flame-wars are the nastiest.

If there's a clear winner, you run with it. If the tools are really different,
(i.e. Python vs. C), you pick the right tool for the job. If the tools do
essentially the same thing in slightly different ways, with slight advantages
and disadvantages in some areas (i.e. KDE / Gnome; vi / emacs; Linux / BSD)
then you resort to ad hominem attacks.

~~~
dman
So much wisdom in so few words, this was one of the times where just an upvote
wasnt enough.

