Re: gcc Experience..so post 3.0..yeup
GCC 1./2 was a mess because of Stallman and his manifest personal failing. He had a toxic reputation even before GCC 1.0 was released. Ex MIT people were everywhere..
I looked at the source code for an early release, shook my head at the mess, and pretty much ignored it for the next decade plus. As did every other serious commercial dev project I saw or heard of. The whole MSDOS/WIn16/Win32/MacOS shrinkwrap world. Some game console guys tried using custom GCC tool chains which kinda worked. For weird processors like the SH-2. But a nightmare to use.
I remember a long dev team meeting about GCC 3.0 in the summer 2001 when it came out. Once I heard it was a throwaway / rewrite I gave it fresh look and it turned out to be pretty stable and usable the next time I used it in an embedded project.
So now if GCC is part of a platform toolchain and I just want to do straight forward low complexity dev work then I see no reason to change. But if the project requires anything special, custom or high complexity then GCC is chucked and a more flexible compiler is used. LLVM compilers have their own problems but the problems I find rarely have me saying - why the f*ck have you done that. Which tends to be a constant refrain in GCC land when trying to do anything non trivial.
But if you are not very familiar with traditional tool sets and how they work the GCC world might seem the only way to do things. For most dev work, its good enough. But there are better more efficient ways. Even though I am an hard core IDE guy I still really miss MPW Shell. Which showed how it should be done. Command O tool integration has never been bettered.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
