Re:Intel C/C++ compilers complete adoption of LLVM
by volta83 on Friday August 13, 2021 @04:54AM
(#28166859)
This is not really a strategy, but rather a consequence of LLVM having hundreds of developers, most of which use LLVM upstream, and therefore don't care about maintaining an API compatibility that they themselves do not need.
It turns out that it is impossible to convince people working on LLVM on their free time or academics to invest part of their time on "preserving" API compatibility instead of adding new features, fixing bugs, or improving perf, for the benefit of companies that don't want to contribute their improvements to the community.
>If you keep most of your code private, following upstream gets very hard. You skip one release, and then its 10x harder, so you skip another release and stop participating in LLVM's evolution cause you'll have to wait years for changes to upstream to land on your compiler. Your competitors do what's best for them, and those can be things that are bad for you, and then you are proper screwed, cause you can't migrate away from LLVM either.
This is an interesting take. I've heard the claim that GCC kept its codebase cryptic to prevent companies running home with it and not upstreaming changes, maybe that's LLVM's strategy.