Thank you for taking the time to shed some light on this. I understand your point about a multi-year project. I actually worked on a debugger before (to support a proprietary complier) so I know decisions in that area are far from random.

As a note for myself, I should check out llvm in greater detail.

> Heck, this is what is was built for in the first place.

LLVM was supposed to be a virtual machine environment (hence the name); I remember when it came out and I was in college doing program language research. It entirely dropped that history and got twisted into a compiler platform much later. And clang only came into existence because the developers of g c (in particular, Richard Stallman) did not want to work with Apple on maintaining LLVM as a gdc backend (which was a stupid stupid decision: Apple said they would be willing to give the copyright of LLVM to the FSF, which would have kept all compiler tech under GPL), which was all well after Apple had been switching to LLVM for their compiler stack (in order to obtain weird optimizations).

Again, no, we didn't care.

First: We were already publishing all our GCC changes, as we did all our work upstream (we worked on a staging branch in the gcc repo, and changes were moved to trunk as fast as possible) Plenty of other companies used our branch and we were happy with it.

We do all our work upstream for clang/llvm as well, and pull compiler releases when upstream is green according to our internal testing. (Pretty much the only cherry picks are a small number of reverts sometimes)

Second, literally nobody has ever come and expressed a concern about using GCC to me.

I've had to explain the runtime and libstdc++ exceptions to people, but that was the other way around -- They weren't worrying, and I needed to make sure they worried and shipped source when they ship it as a .so.

That's true for any developer of embedded software. Any one who makes hardware of any kind will avoid trying to put any GPLv3 licensed code on their hardware.