[cfe-dev] Chrome/mac is all-clang, all-the-time

[Chandler Carruth]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Miles Bader <miles at gnu.org> wrote:

> But I use both, and my impression is that clang's advantages in these
> areas are a bit overstated -- in my typical usage, clang seems "a
> little" faster, but it's typically on the order of 10% or so (on C++
> code with "medium" template usage), and in general, I've found nothing
> particularly wrong with gcc's error messages (there are surely extreme
> cases where they're confusing, but really that's true for any
> compiler).
>

I just want to provide a different perspective. I'm not trying to start a
deep argument about the virtues of different compilers, I just want to
share my observations of Clang as it is used in practice by a reasonably
large group of developers.

When we (Google) started experimenting with Clang, there were many with a
perspective similar to yours. However, with over 6 months of having its
diagnostics in front of thousands of developers, we've come to a different
conclusion.

The overwhelming feedback from C++ developers has been that the diagnostics
from Clang are significantly more clear and helpful. Clang explains how
macros and templates were involved when a particular error is hit, and this
is cited repeatedly as being a fundamental shift in the utility of
diagnostics for C++ code.

Moreover, the way Clang structures its warnings (not errors) allows for
greater precision and lower false positive rates. It doesn't use the
optimizer to produce analysis-based warnings, instead providing a more
stable and source-based analysis framework for them. It has changed how
warnings are perceived in our development community, and we now rely
heavily on Clang to warn about dangerous programming constructs.

That said, while the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, there were
definitely some who were less enthusiastic. Many of these people had worked
with GCC for so long that they exhibited strong change aversion. The
messages from GCC are very familiar, and map to an existing set of problem
descriptions for these people. They faced a learning curve when the
messages changed *at all*, and that was costly. Interestingly, for a
surprising number of people in this bucket, after a few months of using
Clang, they were reluctant to switch back. They had slowly noticed and
started using several common elements of Clang's diagnostics (such as
typo-correction and macro backtraces) without even realizing it. When they
looked at GCC's messages, they didn't have the information they wanted to
understand the problem.

Naturally, YMMV, but this has been our experience with Clang's diagnostics.
As a consequence, we take a very active role in maintaining and improving
them.
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