FreeBSD Is No Longer Building GCC By Default

Indeed. Though who cares? A GPLv2 toolchain worked to build FreeBSD for well over a decade and no one died of viral copyleft pollution. And the similar platform that was far more polluted with this stuff ended up being the one that "won" in the market anyway.

Of all the good reasons behind switching to Clang (or behind having a two-compiler ecosystem in general), "license purity" is IMHO the dumbest.

sigzero• 13 years ago

Getting away from the FSF is the best reason.

vor_• 13 years ago

I watched a presentation from a FreeBSD developer discussing the switch, and one of the reasons cited was that corporate users would be limited by the GPLv3.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

A GPLv2 toolchain worked to build FreeBSD for well over a decade and no one died of viral copyleft pollution.

GCC is no longer a GPLv2 toolchain.

GalacticDomin8r4• 13 years ago

If that were true, the linux kernel would be GPLv3. Licensing exists for a reason. Ignoring it IMHO is the dumbest.

harrytuttle• 13 years ago

Great news! Always good to have some compiler diversity amongst products.

I wonder what this will do to the ports tree though!

markjdb• 13 years ago

Clang has been the default compiler for a while now, and many ports either work just fine or have been patched to work properly with clang. Ports that really need to use gcc (those depending on OpenMP perhaps) can still depend one of the gcc ports.

stekoz• 13 years ago

Some Debian developers are also working since 2012 to bring clang as a better alternative than GCC: http://clang.debian.net/

rwbt• 13 years ago

I wonder how they're getting around the issue of LLVM's lack of OpenMP support. I'm sure there are atleast a few modules in FreeBSD that utilize OpenMP. I too want to switch from GCC to LLVM/Clang but can't right now since LLVM doesn't support OpenMP yet.

sanxiyn3• 13 years ago

Can't those modules simply depend on GCC? FreeBSD is no longer building GCC by default. You can still build GCC as an option.

jevinskie• 13 years ago

You won't have to wait for long! Initial patches have already been accepted as of August 27th.

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.devel/...

http://clang-omp.github.io/

sanxiyn3• 13 years ago

Your link does not show any evidence of this being "accepted".

emaste• 13 years ago

GCC is still available in the ports tree, and specific ports that depend on being built by GCC (for whatever reason) specify that requirement. This change affects only the GCC that shipped in the FreeBSD base system.

4ad• 13 years ago

I'm sure there are atleast a few modules in FreeBSD that utilize OpenMP.

Nothing in the base system uses OpenMP. I find your assumption extremely bizarre (and scary). The kernel and the base system is the kind of software OpenMP would not be of any use. In fact, the base system is not even written in C++, but C; the only C++ components are groff and llvm (go figure).

  $ lsr /usr/src/ | egrep '\.(c|cpp|h|hpp)$' | xargs egrep '^[[:space:]]*#[[:space:]]*pragma[[:space:]]+omp' | grep -v gcc | wc -l
         0

Non-base software from the ports systems uses its own compiler. The system compiler is used for compiling FreeBSD.

Malus• 13 years ago

You forgot devd, which is also written in C++: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sbin/devd/

By default, ports use the system compiler unless it is specifically overridden in the port's Makefile (e.g. USE_GCC=any).

X-Istence2• 13 years ago

Do note that .cc is also a valid C++ extension.

sanxiyn3• 13 years ago

Re: OpenMP

Intel is working on OpenMP support for LLVM/Clang. Runtime part http://www.openmprtl.org/ is BSD. Compiler part http://clang-omp.github.io/ is the same license as LLVM/Clang.

OpenMP is a large feature, so it will take quite some time to be integrated.

leoh• 13 years ago

I could be wrong, but it really seems to me that this is a very good, but somewhat indirect example of Apple's positive influence in the software world. By relying so heavily on LLVM it seems that they helped push LLVM to more robust maturity. Not something a lot of people talk about when they talk about LLVM ;p.

Sephiroth87• 13 years ago

This so many times

icebraining• 13 years ago

Same happened with Webkit and CUPS. Of course, Webkit came from KHTML, which is GPL licensed, so it's not like they had a choice if they wanted to use it.

microtonal• 13 years ago

CUPS was already great and widely used in Unices before Apple bought it.

patrickaljord• 13 years ago

KHTML was LGPL like all kdelibs, not GPL.

gmrple• 13 years ago

I don't really think you can say that. It's not because they did something particularly positive, but more because they did something negative that had positive side effects. A positive externality maybe?

epistasis2• 13 years ago

What was the negative thing that had LLVM as a side effect?

D9u3• 13 years ago

I agree that Apple has helped to promote LLVM/CLANG, but I'd rather give the credit to the Unix community as a whole.

axman62• 13 years ago

"helped promote LLVM/Clang", what, you mean by creating and doing the majority of the work on Clang? That's promotion? And I suppose Microsoft only promote Windows?

eruditely• 13 years ago

Actually I think this point is repeated every time.

DannyBee3• 13 years ago

This is a very interesting perspective on LLVM. I don't believe Apple has the most contributors (IE compared to the community as a whole), and i don't think they ever did.

They also haven't pushed it as much as you'd think. For example, Apple had precisely nothing to do with Linux or FreeBSD support for LLVM.

Now, you could definitely make your statement about clang, but not LLVM itself. Apple deserves a lot of credit for pushing clang forward.

On the LLVM side, however, since about 2 years ago, Google has probably has as much impact on LLVM as Apple, and you hear nothing about this, because they don't hold external developer conferences talking about it.

(You can count the number of Google presos at recent developer meetings if you want a good indication of how involved they are).

Now, of course, in reality, the credit should go to the people doing the work, regardless of where they work, but HN and other places always like to set up these things up as if they are really corporate projects.

jyap• 13 years ago

Uh, quite false in your statements and assumptions.

Do you know that Chris Lattner has worked for Apple since 2005?

Chris Lattner being the "primary author of the LLVM project".

tedunangst3• 13 years ago

Not commenting directly on Apple/LLVM, but sometimes all it takes to make a project succeed is a big name to step in and say they support it. Even if Apple doesn't contribute a line of code, "Apple thinks LLVM is the future" brings new people into the project.

(I also think people use LLVM and clang interchangeably, regardless of technical accuracy. Clearly, the evolution of clang played a big part in FreeBSD switching.)

ianstallings• 13 years ago

Related topic, LLVM vs GCC performance: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=llvm_clan...

I guess if it's a big deal you can always compile gcc. Honestly I'd rather have it compiled for me but that's probably no surprise.

pestaa• 13 years ago

I always had the notion that LLVM is faster than GCC. I don't feel qualified to interpret this benchmark comparison, but they appear to have roughly the same performance?

CJefferson• 13 years ago

LLVM compiles faster than GCC (although the gap has narrowed in the last couple of years). GCC produces faster code than LLVM (although that gap has also narrowed)

riotingpscifis2• 13 years ago

LLVM compiles faster as it optimises less (oversimplified of course).

tjaerv2• 13 years ago

This recent presentation from the 2013 European LLVM Conference outlines the optimization issues LLVM still suffers from, making the produced binaries up to ~10% slower than with GCC for some use cases:

http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-04/#talk3

stock_toaster• 13 years ago

Right, but there are license concerns (gpl3) impacting inclusion of gcc > 4.2 for many of the BSDs. FreeBSD is still using gcc-4.2 I believe.

nullc• 13 years ago

Seemes kind of odd to fixate on a self-contained copyright license (The license of GCC doesn't impact the code compiled with it) while at the same time the LLVM/Clang contributors are not required to release their patents for use, and some (many?) of them are filing patents on techniques they use in LLVM.

To me it seems that they are ignoring an important practical concern (usage of LLVM/Clang may be unlawful in the US and Europe without going out and obtaining patent licenses) in order to address a purely philosophical issue with no practical impact.

It's sort of amusing how the tables have turned over the last twenty years. Twenty years ago it was the FSF/GNU crowd who was making impractical decisions for philosophical/political reasons. ... and as time has gone on the practical importance of strongly free software has become greater and greater.

kingmanaz• 13 years ago

I was excited about PCC when the project was revived a couple years ago, hoping it would become the default compiler for the C++ and GPL phobic OpenBSD. The compiler does not appear to have made much progress in the last couple years, unfortunately.

Perhaps clang will carry over to OpenBSD so the project can ditch their custom version of GCC. PCC, with its few moving parts, does seem to embody the OpenBSD philosophy more than LLVM, though.

tedunangst3• 13 years ago

Just as soon as someone adds vax, sh4, m88k and hppa backends...

indeyets• 13 years ago

I guess you were thinking about NetBSD ;)

asdasf2• 13 years ago

The compiler does not appear to have made much progress in the last couple years, unfortunately.

It was recently removed in fact. There's been talk about adopting LLVM, but it doesn't support a bunch of architectures openbsd does support.

gdonelli• 13 years ago

Honor to Apple for pushing this clang forward, together with WebKit clang is probably one of the most significant contribution to the open source community to date.

octo_t• 13 years ago

I'd disagree and say in terms of significant contributions, Firefox has made the biggest impact, not just on the computing world but in general social terms.

oijaf888• 13 years ago

More so than android?

bnastic• 13 years ago

"probably one of the most significant" is what the parent said - how do you disagree with that?

moron4hire• 13 years ago

This was well known to be coming.

oscargrouch• 13 years ago

since it looks that linux won now, with big players maintaining it and a great ecosystem, i think the hackers love should all go towards FreeBSD now..

its a great OS, with a great background that should advance forward as another good open source option to linux and also against the closed source OS´s all around..

after all the heroic efforts from the FreeBSD community, to make the project going on even without the same support and attention that linux got, i wander if its not the time right now that this wonderfull OS start to get more traction and love from the hacker community?

FreeBSD Is No Longer Building GCC By Default

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