On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 09:19:11PM +0000, Miod Vallat wrote:
> A few of our developers have, over the years, become unafraid of gcc,
> and able to investigate issues, backport fixes, and fix or work around
> bugs: I'll only mention niklas@, espie@, etoh@ and otto@, and hope the
> few others will forgive me for not listing their names. This has not
> been an easy road, to say the least. Now, another few of our developers
> are working on building a similar knowledge of llvm. I wish them a lot
> of luck, and I will try to join them in the near future.
>
> In the meantime I am not sure they feel confident enough to support
> switching the most popular OpenBSD platforms from gcc to llvm.
I'm still somewhat afraid of gcc. I actively hate some of the changes they've
made in the attribute code between 2.95 and 4.2.
I've completely given up trying to cooperate with the FSF on this. They only
accept changes to -current, and they take long enough to review it and
complain about style issue that most often, you have to prepare the patch
again.
It is also a complete waste of time, since the GPLv2 version is now totally
unsupported, so any change we give back will become more of the hated GPLv3
code base.
At least LLVM/clang is under a sane licence. And it hasn't suffered thru
years of paranoia ("but if we disentangle the front and back-end, some
evil evil commercial outfit may use it to write a proprietary back-end of
gcc")
So, even if it's a lot of work, even if some platforms are not supported
(yet) by llvm/clang, at least the work we put into it won't be pure OpenBSD
work that's a complete waste of time where upstream is concerned...
