FreeBSD 10 To Use Clang Compiler, Deprecate GCC

[pocopito]

I'm not sure if this fits in this forum, but II found this info via slashdot, and guess could be interesting:
http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/12/05/13/ ... recate-gcc

I had no idea of the existence of this tool, and I've made a couple of tests and seems quite interesting. Here are some examples of how it works:
http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html

Regards

E Diaz

[ZirconiumX]

Clang was built by Apple, because they were getting impatient with GCC's (lack of) support of Objective C/Objective C++. (GNU rates ObjC as 'low priority').

So apple funded a project to supercede GCC, which was for C-family LANGuages.

The main points are:

GCC's compiles, when optimized, are optimized ahead of time.
Clang's compiles, when optimized, are optimized partially ahead of time, partially just in time.

I find Clang compiles to be about 10-20 percent faster for TSCP than GCC, just to give a perspective.

But, personally, I wouldn't use Clang or GCC.

I would use DragonEgg with -fplugin-arg-dragonegg-enable-gcc-optzns for hardcore performance.

Maybe Jim Ablett should give LLVM a try.

Matthew:out

[JuLieN]

I recently ran into a problem with Clang: it doesn't implement GCC's "global registers" type, so the emulator I was trying to compile for my iPad didn't work. (the QDos team, another emulator team, had also to find work-arounds). What I could read in the fora is that implementing them is not in their to-do list, sadly.

But apart from that, everything I tried compiled just fine and was faster than with GCC. Although, being a pascal programmer I don't use C much, and when I use clang it's mainly for objective-c.

[Jim Ablett]

Clang was built by Apple, because they were getting impatient with GCC's (lack of) support of Objective C/Objective C++. (GNU rates ObjC as 'low priority').

So apple funded a project to supercede GCC, which was for C-family LANGuages.

The main points are:

GCC's compiles, when optimized, are optimized ahead of time.
Clang's compiles, when optimized, are optimized partially ahead of time, partially just in time.

I find Clang compiles to be about 10-20 percent faster for TSCP than GCC, just to give a perspective.

But, personally, I wouldn't use Clang or GCC.

I would use DragonEgg with -fplugin-arg-dragonegg-enable-gcc-optzns for hardcore performance.

Maybe Jim Ablett should give LLVM a try.

Matthew:out

Last time I tested it (about 5 months ago) I was a bit disappointed as I had heard great things
but it produced slightly slower executables than GCC for me, though the build time speed was amazing.
I will test again.

Jim.

[jdart]

I believe they are doing it partly for licensing reasons, and partly because it is more modular and supports syntax-aware tools better. Not primarily because of performance (benchmarks I've seen show it better than GCC on some things but not consistently better).

--Jon