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

[Chandler Carruth]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Miles Bader <miles at gnu.org> wrote:

> 2011/11/1 Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com>:
> > 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.
>
> Yeesh, could you get any more condescending?


I'm really sorry that came off as condescending, it wasn't meant to be. The
cost imposed by switching to Clang's error messages was one we took very
seriously. Working with GCC for a long time isn't a negative statement
about the developer, it's a simple reality given the long history GCC has
in the open source community as essentially the only compiler option
available.

When evaluating Clang's error messages the threshold wasn't just being
better based on the average feedback than GCC's messages; the improvement
had to be sufficiently large to justify paying for the learning curve.
There was a lot of debate, and a lot of things had to be fixed in Clang's
diagnostics before it was clear that the cost/benefit tradeoff here
supported transitioning to Clang's diagnostics across the board.
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