Daddy is a dick, he and mommy have grown up together. They share their complex internals with each other and were made for each other. They share even their philosophical stance on code freedom. How can you turn your back on that. Why jump to another woman just because she is thinner and more in demand with with researches?

> They share even their philosophical stance on code freedom

arguable.

BSD and commercial Unices used PCC and PCC derivitives for much of their history; by this token, GCC is the 'other woman', and this is itself ignoring the clear differences in philosophy between MIT/BSD and GPL licening

But this is about Linux.

doh. good point :)

Well, I did say ELI5. So, thanks, um, I guess.

I do strive to be age-appropriate!

> with a significantly less complicated code base

This is probably not true (because clang is in C++ it can't be less complicated than anything), and gcc is complicated in some parts because it uses much better algorithms (the LLVM register allocator is not as good as LRA). LLVM also has some very ugly DSLs like the .td files.

But GCC's codebase does have lots of added complexity from the extremely weird GNU coding style where they want you to pretend you're writing Lisp and all commits have to update a changelog file. Plus terrible GNU software like autotools and recursive make.

I like autotools. So much better than cmake.