Alternatives to gcc (was Re: gcc 4.3: when will it become standard compiler?)

[Roman Divacky]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 01:15:00PM -0500, Jung-uk Kim wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 January 2009 12:52 pm, Roman Divacky wrote:
> > > advantage. If it appears at some moment that llvm works well and
> > > produces code as fast as gcc, for all the platforms of interest
> > > for the FreeBSD people, i have no doubt that they will switch
> > > immediately. But one of the aims of
> >
> > the day is already here... llvm produces roughly the same quality
> > of code and it has promises of delivering even much better code in
> > near future.
> >
> > llvm does not have to maintain 20 years old cruft and is based on
> > modern development methods.
> >
> > there are even reports of llvm producing significantly better code
> > (for bzip2 iirc etc.)
> 
> ATM, one of the biggest problems I see with LLVM+Clang is it is not 
> self-hosting as it is almost entirely written in C++.  I think 
> buildworld is one of the most important requirements of FreeBSD 
> project, IMHO.

well.. the c++ part of clang is almost non-existant atm but given
the pace of development I wouldn't be surprised if it compiled
some simple things (really simple, like  hello world) this summer
and medium sized projects in summer 2009...

note... there has not been a SINGLE public release of clang... yet
the results are already quite impressive.

I'd expect self-hosting of clang in 2 years (but I am not authority here
just a quite well informed observer)