[cfe-dev] How clang is seen outside the community (Was: Re: david's integer overflow stuff)

[Chris Lattner]

On Sep 17, 2010, at 5:14 PM, OvermindDL1 wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 4:44 PM, David Chisnall <csdavec at swan.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On 17 Sep 2010, at 23:24, Chris Lattner wrote:
>>> I don't see how this affects adoption.  If they haven't adopted it yet, then a change from 2.7->2.8 won't affect them.
>> 
>> Because the major negative comment that is raised when I suggest people adopt clang is that they don't want to be tied in to Apple's compiler.  It's much harder to convince them that clang is a community project that Apple is the largest contributor when the official policy is that issues that affect Apple code are show stoppers and patches that break Apple code are summarily reverted rather than having trivial fixes applied, while patches that break non-Apple code do not require any code review before committing (as long as Apple's stuff is fine) and are not considered release-blockers.

this isn't an apple feature, afaik, noone at apple really uses -ftrapv because it is so broken in GCC.  The breakage and the bug reports were being filed by external people, e.g. the freebsd community.

> This post from another newsgroup I frequent is somewhat related and
> may give you any idea of a view of clang from outside the clang
> community, but by people that are using it:
> 
> On Yesterday, someone somewhere else wrote:
>> /* snip some */
>> Clang, I'm afraid to say, takes the GCC approach in the worst way
>> possible 

*shrug*  They are complaining that clang supports GCC compatible flags.  As you probably know, very little in clang is tied to this.  They are really just complaining that noone has gotten around to having a "clean and simple" command line interface to the compiler.  Besides noone stepping up to do this, it's unclear what purpose it would serve and what "clean and simple" really means.  All the complexity that exists is there for a reason.  If their GUI wrapper wants to be compatible with the worlds code, they will have to grapple with this complexity one way or the other.

-Chris