| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |
| FreeBSD moves away from GCC, embraces Clang |
| By special contributor R_T_F_M on 2012-09-13 21:19:45 |
| "For the past several years we've been working towards migrating from GCC to Clang/LLVM as our default compiler. We intend to ship FreeBSD 10.0 with Clang as the default compiler on i386 and amd64 platforms. To this end, we will make WITH_CLANG_IS_CC the default on i386 and amd64 platforms on November 4th." |
|
| performance? |
| By sergio on 2012-09-13 22:53:24 |
|
Well... I hope the performance of Clang compiled FreeBSD 10 will be on par with gcc compiled FreeBSD 9. This kind of decisions remind me a lot to the "eat your own dog food" attitude so common in big IT companies... now Open Source world is suffering the same affection. |
 - Score: 1 |
| Comment by gloucestershrubhill |
| By gloucestershrubhill on 2012-09-13 23:10:12 |
| Affliction? |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: performance? |
| By ssokolow on 2012-09-13 23:52:03 |
|
I think you're mixing up your terms. NIH (Not Invented Here) is an affliction. Eating your own dogfood is a praise-worthy quality that means that you're less likely to ship garbage because the people most able to fix problems that annoy them are full-blown users. |
| - Score: 12 |
| C++ |
| By kwan_e on 2012-09-14 01:26:47 |
| Ironic, now that the biggest projects written in C are compiled with something written in C++ (or, increasingly so, in GCC's case). |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: C++ |
| By satsujinka on 2012-09-14 03:02:20 |
| There's nothing ironic about it. Different projects use different languages. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: C++ |
| By satsujinka on 2012-09-14 06:43:00 |
|
Irrational? Hardly. My argument against C++ is/was always about complexity. Regardless of your views on my views, my participation has nothing to do with irony. I was merely correcting your misuse of the word. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: C++ |
| By moondevil on 2012-09-14 07:26:21 |
|
I think people are slowly accepting that C++ eventually gets to replace C in most areas where C is still relevant in the desktop/server. MacOS X device drivers are done in C++ (IOKit). Most of the Win32 APIs since Windows 2000 are actually COM based and Microsoft publicly announced that C is only relevant for legacy code and they rather focus in C++. More so in Windows 8. Symbian and BeOS are done in C++. Only Linux and BSD are still have pure C/ASM kernels. I don't know about Aix, HP-UX and Solaris. Now for embedded systems C still have a place, as many of them are still coded in Assembly and companies are now slowly moving up to C. Of course C will exist for decades still, as it does not make sense to rewrite code that works just for changing language. |
| - Score: 12 |
| RE[4]: C++ |
| By kwan_e on 2012-09-14 10:01:45 |
|
> Irrational? Hardly. My argument against C++ is/was always about complexity. There exists other languages that promote complexity much more than C++. eg, Java and C, IRONICALLY. But what makes your arguments irrational are your supporting arguments. It's not irrational to argue against complexity, but it is irrational to bring up irrelevant and downright unsafe practices as proof of a language's unnecessary complexity. If I may remind you, you plainly stated that it was preferable (to you) to risk buffer overruns with array management than using slightly more complex but safer features of a language. That is highly irrational. > Regardless of your views on my views, my participation has nothing to do with irony. I was merely correcting your misuse of the word. It has everything to do with irony. I just looked up a couple of explanations of the concept "situational irony". This situation fits, and even more so with your involvement. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[5]: C++ |
| By dnebdal on 2012-09-14 11:10:26 |
|
> > Irrational? Hardly. My argument against C++ is/was always about complexity. There exists other languages that promote complexity much more than C++. eg, Java and C, IRONICALLY. But what makes your arguments irrational are your supporting arguments. It's not irrational to argue against complexity, but it is irrational to bring up irrelevant and downright unsafe practices as proof of a language's unnecessary complexity. I don't know - Java does encourage over-design, but C++ encourages nigh-unreadable template fun and magical mystery action-at-a-distance. Of course, C++ in the right hands is fine, and it does also depend on what you're coding against (Qt code tends to look good to me), and dash of C++ can remove a lot of pain from a C project. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[6]: C++ |
| By kwan_e on 2012-09-14 12:59:41 |
|
> I don't know - Java does encourage over-design, but C++ encourages nigh-unreadable template fun and magical mystery action-at-a-distance. Nothing about C++ encourages templates. Most of the useful template stuff is already expressed in the standard library. Programmers who aren't cowboy coders won't use metaprogramming - and we must use non-cowboy-coders as a standard candle because cowboy coders can do damage in any language equally. I would say that RAII prevents most occurrences of mystery action-at-a-distance. Resources have limited scope and are cleaned up once out of scope, reducing chances of mystery action-at-a-distance. Conversely, Java lacking destructors and relying on cleanup functions being called explicitly in finally blocks fails to improve upon C++ as was the aim. Overreliance on inheritance as a way of extending functionality is error-prone, and in Eclipse, for example, often requires looking at code of the superclass to make sure your extensions don't break it. That's extreme mystery action at a distance. |
| - Score: 2 |
| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |