
GCC Receives ACM’s 2014 Programming Languages Software Award - ck2
http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2014/07/25/gcc-receives-acm-award/
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cokernel_hacker
LLVM received this award back in 2010:
[http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/Software/2010](http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/Software/2010)

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ck2
Bad timing with Linus rant eh?

~~~
Pacabel
The timing is odd, but not because of that particular bug.

I think the past several years have been a rather low point for GCC. It hasn't
been as bad as the 1996-1999 period of stagnation and strife, mind you, but it
hasn't been particularly good, either.

LLVM and Clang have offered the first real competition that GCC has had to
face in a long time. We've actually seen Clang be the leader in some cases,
offering improvements that have then been implemented in GCC sometime later
(like better diagnostics, colored diagnostic messages, the use of C++, etc.,
etc.).

Meanwhile, we haven't really seen anything truly compelling come out of GCC
camp. Recent versions of have offered some optimization improvements, but
nothing earth-shattering (in a good way). Its C++11 and C++14 support is quite
good, but so is Clang's. The Go front end might be the most interesting
development, but Go isn't a particularly interesting language, and GCC's
version lags that of the main Go implementation.

I could see an award perhaps being deserved after successfully coming back
from a period of stagnation like we've seen, after delivering several positive
and revolutionary changes in a short period of time. But small, incremental
improvements, or merely catching up with competitors, doesn't seem all that
remarkable.

~~~
RVuRnvbM2e
While it has many advantages, clang still isn't as robust as gcc ( e.g.
[http://clang.debian.net/](http://clang.debian.net/) ), and the code it
produces can be slower ( e.g. [http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1404144-KH-
CLANG359076](http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1404144-KH-CLANG359076) ) I
guess clang is still a few decades of testing and tuning behind gcc, though
it's catching up fast.

~~~
Pacabel
I don't think those results really support the point that you're trying to
make.

The top result, which is the most significant, is pretty much irrelevant, for
example. It's limited to Haskell-related packages. Most Debian users have
absolutely no reason to use those packages.

After that, we start running into rather obscure options that only GCC
supports, or bad code that GCC accepts, or code that's just bad in general, or
extremely obscure packages that very few people would ever consider using.
These don't indicate a problem with LLVM or Clang.

The fact that FreeBSD managed to very successfully switch to Clang for
compiling the kernel and base system, and the fact that it's very widely used
on OS X, suggests to me that LLVM and Clang are more than robust enough for
everyday use.

