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Re: building against Clang (was: Legitimate exercise of...)



On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 05:02:11PM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Russ Allbery (2014-10-28 17:20:02) at debian-vote@l.d.o
> > For the compiler, all of Debian is built with GCC, but some teams do 
> > test builds with Clang and report bugs, which most maintainers merge 
> > and some don't.
> 
> Speaking of which: Is it Policy or just habit to use GCC over Clang?

* portability:
  Clang is available only on 13/22 architectures in Debian (counting first
  and second class ports).
* speed of generated code
* quality of generated debug info

This is ambivalent:
* quality of error messages
  Clang has put more effort into C++ templates, but tends to be as good or
  worse generally.  It's sometimes as bad as giving a cryptic message while
  not providing a line number at all.

This is where Clang wins:
* speed of compilation

For a binary distribution like Debian, GCC's pros win, with lack of
portability being nearly disqualifying.

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