In the quarterly report for FreeBSD, we learned something interesting: the FreeBSD developers intend to replace GCC with LLVM/Clang. The FreeBSD project wants to replace the GNU Compiler Collection with the Apple-backed Clang front-end compiler from
LLVM. They mention in
their quarterly report that this newer compiler can already build 99% of the packages in FreeBSD and even its kernel on i386 and amd64 architectures. They admit though bugs are withstanding and LLVM's C++ support is still very immature. There are over 100 Clang bugs that the FreeBSD developers have reported, but the LLVM developers are working on them.
Will we see more free software operating systems switching to LLVM/Clang? LLVM is more modular, is a newer code-base, is licensed to be more commercial friendly, and is already being used for tasks like
compiling and optimizing GPU shaders.
