A potential competitor for GCC: pcc [LWN.net]

A potential competitor for GCC: pcc

Posted Oct 30, 2007 23:51 UTC (Tue) by bfeeney (subscriber, #6855)
In reply to: A potential competitor for GCC: pcc by hippy
Parent article: A potential competitor for GCC: pcc

Interestingly, that sounds a lot like LLVM, which is more likely to replace GCC (thanks to the clang front-end) than GCC. Frontends (like clang) generate their intermediate representation in LLVMs very low-level intermediate representation and then they have a choice

They can use the rest of the toolchain to generate native code for a particular platform, which they distribute or
They can assemble the IR objects into a bundle (I have to admit to not knowing a great deal about the specifics of this) which they then distribute. Users with a properly configured environment with LLVM installed will have that converted to native code using a JIT like Java.

I think it's possible to IR compiled on the host platform as well - certainly it wouldn't be particularly difficult.

To be honest, I find the *BSD's fascination with PCC to be a bit odd - the main reason it's so fast is because it does so little, applications generated by it certainly won't be faster than their GCC equivalents for some time to come. LLVM and clang, on the other hand, offer good performance now, and are jointly distributed under a BSD licence, with clang getting significant support from Apple. I think it would be worth their while trying to partake, and therby control the direction of, clang development rather than start almost from scratch with PCC.

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