<story><title>GCC 8.2 Released</title><url>https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-8/changes.html#GCC8.2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jhoechtl</author><text>Can anybody comment on the love for Clang vs. the declining importance of GCC? As it seems to me:&lt;p&gt;GCC supports more platforms
GCC creates more performant code&lt;p&gt;Is it a license thing or a technical driven issue?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>readittwice</author><text>I guess both. GCC is very good for compiling C&amp;#x2F;C++ to machine code. But if you want to write a new language and reuse an existing compiler pipeline (Rust, Swift,..) or write a new tool based on a C++-parser (clang-format, clang-tiny, clangd,...) then LLVM is the way to go.&lt;p&gt;LLVM-IR has enabled this nice separation between the language front-end and the compilation back-end. GCC could have done that too: they didn&amp;#x27;t for political reasons. Why? Someone could have used GCC&amp;#x27;s C++ front-end for its proprietary compilation pipeline. Today this is nearly impossible to change in GCC.&lt;p&gt;There are also some other advantages for LLVM I like: it supports multiple architectures in a single binary. With GCC I need to compile the compiler either for x64 or arm but not both. GCC is still great but it&amp;#x27;s not surprising that LLVM is so successful.</text></comment>
<story><title>GCC 8.2 Released</title><url>https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-8/changes.html#GCC8.2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jhoechtl</author><text>Can anybody comment on the love for Clang vs. the declining importance of GCC? As it seems to me:&lt;p&gt;GCC supports more platforms
GCC creates more performant code&lt;p&gt;Is it a license thing or a technical driven issue?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simias</author><text>Be wary of the optical illusion of the hype cycle, if you base yourself on HN&amp;#x27;s frontpage you&amp;#x27;d think that Rust is more important than C++. In my experience GCC is still the default C and C++ compiler on Linux in most of the industry. If it ain&amp;#x27;t broke, why change it?&lt;p&gt;Even though I still use GCC to build by C code I&amp;#x27;m very happy that LLVM exists, it brought some new blood and much needed competition to the FLOSS compiler scene. It also gave a better architecture to build on if you want to create a new language, it&amp;#x27;s great that a language like Rust for instance can generate such good machine code by building on top of the LLVM backend. In the GCC-only days the easiest way to create a new compiled language was to emit C as an intermediary target...</text></comment>