Rust and GCC, two different ways [LWN.net]

Rust and GCC, two different ways

Posted Oct 12, 2021 16:00 UTC (Tue) by Aldrichwright (guest, #154721)
In reply to: Rust and GCC, two different ways by tialaramex
Parent article: Rust and GCC, two different ways

"exactly three compilers for C++ in 2021"

Funny, can I can think of others. There's the Intel C++ compiler for instance as well as the IBM XLC++ for the mianframe. Let's not forget Embarcadero's C++ compiler-C++ builder (derived from Bordand's C++).

So, there may be 3 compilers in common use for macOS, Linux and windows but:

1. There are a lot more platforms than those three (unix, vms.... which I believe still runs somewhere, etc).
2. There are other C++ compilers that run on those three platforms, of which Intel and Embarcadero are two.

Rust and GCC, two different ways

Posted Nov 12, 2021 12:09 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

IBM's XLC++ had _partial_ support for C++ 11. The last version of C++ they claim _full_ support for is C++ 03. If you're excited about anything less than 18 years old in C++ maybe it works in XLC++ but probably it doesn't. Being pragmatic, IBM abandoned XLC++ and shipped Clang instead.

Intel and Embarcadero likewise shipped Clang. Because again, they couldn't keep up. You put your team to work delivering C++ 11 and by the time they're shipping alpha previews the committee finalises C++ 14. So you ask customers, do you want us to focus all our effort on C++ 14 or should we regroup and just ship LLVM's perfectly good C++ compiler but with all the nice stuff you like? No surprises what the customers say.

I didn't claim that there had never been this rich tapestry of different C++ compilers, I wrote only about the status today, in 2021, there are exactly three C++ compilers.

Rust and GCC, two different ways

Posted Nov 12, 2021 13:17 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Intel and Embarcadero likewise shipped Clang. Because again, they couldn't keep up.

This was true for Arm too; With ARMCC 6, they moved to Clang, extending it to maintain frontend/cmdline compatibility with the older stuff. But ARMCC, as shipped, remains as proprietary as ever.

(While Arm contributes a lot to upstream GCC and LLVM, what landed upstream tended to lag significantly from what they shipped in ARMCC. Granted, that policy could have changed in the three years since I worked there...)