On 19/08/16 15:19, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote: > On 19/08/16 09:25, Andrew Haley wrote: >> On 18/08/16 19:37, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote: >>> On 18/08/16 19:29, Dennis Clarke wrote: >>>> On 08/18/2016 02:24 PM, Anna Szekér wrote: >>>>> Witch compiler would you compare it to? >>>> >>>> A reasonable comparison would be the Oracle Studio 12.5 compiler which >>>> creates wonderfully optimal code on both Sparc and x86 architectures. >>> >>> If somebody writes a nice comparison in the style of >>> http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html >> >> But hopefully slightly less self serving. > > To be honest, it doesn't seem an unfair characterization to me. > > GCC could highlight the ethical and tit-for-tat benefits of the GPL, but I > guess they do not see those as a benefit. It says: "GCC is licensed under the GPL license. clang uses a BSD license, which allows it to be embedded in software that is not GPL-licensed." Note that GCC "is licensed under" the GPL licence" whereas clang "uses" a BSD licence. Why not say that GCC uses the GPL licence? I could just as much write "GCC uses the GPL license. clang uses a BSD license, which allows evil bastard proprietary software companies to take the free and open code of clang and release and sell versions with licence restrictions but no source code." and put that in the "Pro's of GCC vs clang" section. I urge them to say so and will be happy to allow them to use that sentence without even requiring any attribution! > GCC has also the benefit of being a more mature code base and, as a > result, it has been more thoroughly tested in a wider range of > codes; yet this is difficult to quantify and arguably Clang is more > widely used today than GCC, just not in Linux, thus this might not > be true anymore. > > Is there anything else there that you think is misleading or plain > wrong? It's fair to point out that clang is faster, but "much" faster is an opinion. Most of the "Pro's of clang vs GCC" are design decisions which may well be of interest to the maintainers but don't affect users who just want a compiler. Of course the authors of clang think their design decisions are better and they're prepared to defend them. But an observer who was trying hard to be neutral would describe them as differences. Andrew.
