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

Rust and GCC, two different ways

Posted Nov 12, 2021 12:09 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Rust and GCC, two different ways by Aldrichwright
Parent article: Rust and GCC, two different ways

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.

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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...)