Re: [TESTING]: ClangBSD branch needs testing before the import to HEAD

Scott Long wrote:
> Sounds like you're inviting the discussion right now. I'll start =-)
>
> 1. I hate gcc with the burning heat of a million suns.  It's not a tool, it's a political weapon wielded by the FSF and their acolytes.  It's also a crummy piece of software that has been "good enough" for far too long.  Its development model is a burden to work with and has been a major liability towards FreeBSD releases in the past.  Its demise cannot happen soon enough.

Without that "political weapon" FreeBSD would not have the rich userland
it has today.  It may not be as important any more but it sure surely
was in the '80s into the early '90s.

As for the problems with gcc, you have to understand the history.  I was
the x86 maintainer for a few years, yet by the time of my involvement
around 1990 the basic architecture had already been set around the
MC68000 with the question being whether Alpha, MIPS or etc would be the
future - nobody expected x86 to be viable for much longer and the goal
was "widely-retargetable" at least until things settled out.  The x86
did not meet gcc's minimum processor requirements and required hacks to
work at all. Had it not been for RMS's insistence x86 might have been
deprecated.

The other key issue was how little manpower was available.  There was
only one person paid to do gcc work - if you call RMS's "activist wages"
paid - and the volunteers worked out of whatever spare time they had.  I
already had an 80 hour/week job *before* volunteering and I think that
was not unusual.  As a result design decisions were strongly tilted in
favor of maintainability over performance.  A lot of good code donations
were rejected because we simply could not afford to maintain it.  I
think I accepted only one significant code donation for x86 because of
that (the 387 reg-stack code).

If someone is willing to do a clean-sheet design around the realities
and manpower of 2010 instead of 1988 that's a good thing.

I do suggest modifying the FreeBSD build process so that uname -a shows
the compiler and its version for both the kernel and userland.