[cfe-dev] Why clang needs to fork into itself?

[Ted Kremenek]

On Jan 28, 2014, at 2:16 PM, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:

> On 01/28/2014 14:10, Ted Kremenek wrote:
>> The few million users of Clang that I deal with never invoke the compiler directly from the command line.  Most of them probably don’t know how to.  The use the compiler from an IDE.  That can, however, look at a build log and see that a crash report was generated for them, including a shell script that can be provided in a bug report that reruns the compiler with the correct arguments to reproduce the crash.
> 
> If they don't know how to run a compiler, how can they possibly know know to program anything? Programming is much more complicated and involved than simply running a compiler. And you are saying there are millions of them?
> 
> Yuri

For them they know enough to run the compiler.  They can simply click “Build” in an IDE.  Sure they need to understand the compilation model, as implied by the programming language, but they don’t need to memorize all the list of flags, etc., that are needed to run the compiler from the command line.  I’m not saying that everyone doesn’t know how to use the compiler directly from the command line, but I’d argue that a very large constituency of developers (who clearly have demonstrated that they can write software) don’t have this knowledge, nor do they need it.