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The people in the OpenBSD project seem pretty happy with their toolchain. pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress. Making a really good c compiler is hard and I don't think they have the people or interest at this time.

I don't think they would switch to clang. LLVM is also c++.



>pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress.

That's a shame. PCC seemed an interesting alternative to gcc, though I do recall PCC's v1.0 "revival" coinciding with an April Fools day several years ago. Perhaps it always was to be taken as a joke.

OpenBSD's simplicity in implementation is laudable. The less moving parts there are the less parts there are to break. It's the same philosophy that keeps me driving my 25-year old pickup.


I am not sure they are happy. They have the C++ compiler written in C that they want, but:

- they have to maintain their own gcc version (the last GPL2 one)

- the licensing for clang and LLVM fits the BSDs better than the licensing for gcc.

If they want to keep the ability to bootstrap from a C compiler, they should consider creating a good C backend (configurable with such things as the size of a long) for LLVM. That way, they could convert any C++ code (including clang and LLVM) to C, and thus bootstrap a C++ compiler on a system that only has a C compiler.

Does anybody see problems with that approach?




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