Thoughts on llvm/clang in base

[B. Estrade]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 01:28:32PM -0400, Justin Sherrill wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Carsten Mattner
> <carstenmattner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > May I ask the Dragonfly developers what their opinion is regarding
> > llvm/clang efforts as exercised by FreeBSD and Bitrig? I'm not
> > suggesting making such a change but just asking for your thoughts.
> 
> clang works now as a compiler on DragonFly.  You can add it from
> pkgsrc.  See 'man compilers.conf'
> 
> http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=compilers.conf&section=ANY
> 
> If I recall correctly, you can build world and maybe kernel with it.
> You can also use it for pkgsrc.
> 
> Because John Marino is doing an impressive job bringing in newer
> versions of gcc, and also because we're not terribly worried about the
> existence of the GPL, there's no rush to make it part of the base
> since it's already usable with little effort.
> 
> There's other people with different opinions on this, but that's a
> fair summation, I think/

Just throwing this out there, but one thing that made me sad about
FreeBSD's dumping GCC as base was that it was also dumping OpenMP
support. Given that SMP is the goal, it was a pretty hefty technical
benefit that was thrown away for mostly political reasons. I hope
OpenMP support in clang/LLVM is bolstered in practice, there are certainly
a number of academic efforts using it for OpenMP research. I am not
aware of a strong clang/LLVM effort to support it outside of that arena, 
though. That DF has GCC with faily current OpenMP support in base is a
strong reason for me to consider using it primarily over FreeBSD,
which is my traditional go-to BSD.

Thank you,
Brett