Even more fun with building and benchmarking Firefox with GCC and Clang

Re:Even more fun with building and benchmarking Firefox with... by craftkiller on Monday December 31, 2018 @12:29PM (#18795642)

GCC was intentionally designed to be hard to extend with proprietary extensions (there's an email from RMS somewhere explicitly stating that)

Whereas llvm/clang was designed as a library to be open and extensible, which lead to a lot of tooling being built around it.

Unrelated to license, clang also has far better error messages than gcc.

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Re:Even more fun with building and benchmarking Firefox with... by loeg on Monday December 31, 2018 @05:13PM (#18797383)

> clang also has far better error messages than gcc.

This was true a number of years ago, but I believe GCC's diagnostics have gotten much better in response to competition and don't believe it to be true anymore (although my experience is with C code, not C++ — maybe Clang is better there).

Another distinction is that GCC continues to hold a significant lead in producing accurate debuginfo, which is invaluable to me as a developer.

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Re:Even more fun with building and benchmarking Firefox with... by lorenzhs on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @09:07AM (#18800223)

I think both compilers give good error messages (C++14 and C++17). Sometimes one is clearer, sometimes the other, so what I usually do if I can't immediately figure out what the compiler is complaining about is to try the other one and see if that clears things up or at least narrows it down a bit. Works surprisingly often :)

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