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0 pointsfulafel8y ago0 comments

It's slightly oversimplified. Apple hired Chris Lattner from academia to ramp up work on LLVM & create Clang. (Apple always hated GNU stuff so the motive might not have been purely technical.)

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GeekyBear8y ago

There were a couple of purely technical reasons for Apple to pursue Clang.

1.) GCC was designed for command line use, not to provide integration (for instance, debugging info) into a modern IDE.

2.) Objective-C was not a priority for those who maintained GCC, but was for Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

fulafelOP8y ago

The Objective-C story is a little more complicated. Originally Apple had a hostile fork of GCC and even initially refused to provide source code until the FSF lawyers got involved. It's a small wonder the GCC Objective-C support is as good as it is considering the politics.

Debugging info works similarly in all compilers (GCC, MSVC etc) - it's saved in the compiler output and read by the tools like IDEs.

GeekyBear8y ago

>For instance, GCC uses a step called fold that is key to the overall compile process, which has the side effect of translating the code tree into a form that looks unlike the original source code. If an error is found during or after the fold step, it can be difficult to translate that back into one location in the original source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Design

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

GeekyBear8y ago

There were a couple of purely technical reasons for Apple to pursue Clang.

1.) GCC was designed for command line use, not to provide integration (for instance, debugging info) into a modern IDE.

2.) Objective-C was not a priority for those who maintained GCC, but was for Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

fulafelOP8y ago

Debugging info works similarly in all compilers (GCC, MSVC etc) - it's saved in the compiler output and read by the tools like IDEs.

GeekyBear8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Design

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse