Heads up, g++ in Xcode 5 points to Clang

[Joakim]

On Monday, 28 October 2013 at 15:49:41 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
Wakeling wrote:
> On 28/10/13 14:22, evilrat wrote:
>> sure, but i would prefer LLVM license over GCC if i were in 
>> Apple dev team(and
>> that what they did). also LLVM is quite young, so who knows 
>> what people
>> contribute to it in near future...
>
> Surely, but we should have sympathy for Apple's desire to be 
> able to exert proprietary control over their products because 
> ... ? :-)
Do you have any evidence that they've exerted "proprietary 
control" over llvm, say by adding closed modules to their 
compiler?

I actually talked to the head llvm guy at Apple about this 
possibility a couple years back and he was adamantly against 
anyone outside closing up parts of the compiler.  Of course, he 
may not get to make that decision at Apple and we can't know the 
truth unless we peek at the source for the shipping compiler at 
Apple, but I haven't seen any evidence that llvm isn't developed 
in the open.

Have you?

> Don't get me wrong, LLVM itself is a fantastic project, and as 
> long as people contribute great code to great free software 
> projects I don't really mind what their motivation is, but if 
> Apple's goal is to avoid the patent-related provisions of 
> GPLv3, we could be in for a nasty surprise at some point in the 
> future if compiler-related patents Apple holds become part of 
> the battleground of the computing market.
While I do not buy Apple products because of their odious patent 
stance, I highly doubt they would ever use such compiler patents, 
if they even have any.  Microsoft has a patent on continually 
scanning a document for spelling errors and highlighting them 
(http://www.google.com/patents/US5787451), yet _as far as we 
know_ (and according to a former Microsoft employee - 
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=1548), they've never 
asserted it on the dozens of applications with such 
spell-checking in their text editing controls, including this 
Chrome browser tab I'm currently typing into.

I agree that it is a problem that Apple doesn't do a patent grant 
for their open source projects, assuming they even have any 
compiler or other software patents on them, but I'm skeptical 
they'd ever enforce those anyway.  Also, IANAL, but I believe 
they'd never be able to extract any money from such a lawsuit 
anyway, since they don't make any money from clang or Safari and 
give them away for free.

> From a purely technical point of view, Apple doesn't need a 
> compiler that supports a wide range of platforms, so GCC's much 
> broader range of hardware support is irrelevant to it.  But 
> it's an advantage GCC continues to have in the bigger picture.
Sure.