Hacker News Reader

Make and most other build systems respect the CC and CXX variables.

Switching compilers is a very common thing among systems developers.. bootstrapping OS builds, crosscompiling for a different arch, getting compiler feedback from another compiler, etc

For projects that use configuration frameworks it's often just setting an environment variable like CC or CXX to point to the compiler(s) you want and they'll use those particular binaries when building.

If there is a symlink it's probably ill advised to change it since it would be system-wide.

There are env variables as others have mentioned, and additionally in NetBSD it's configurable in mk.conf[0]. I know, Net is not Open, but they look remarkably similar in this toolchain regard for system/package builds. Can't speak to Free or Dragon Fly, though. I wouldn't be surprised if they've diverged.

[0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/pkgsrc/clang/