Which is why some people get a bit nervous when one tool (clang and the LLVM universe in general, curl, WebKit) becomes such a massive de facto standard it completely marginalizes competition. This is even true if something is Open Source: X11 edged out everything else in that general space (MGR, NeWS) to the point those two things I just mentioned are pretty well forgotten, and we don't know what we lost because of that.

It's possible some spaces can't have more than one player due to network effects (like network protocols, such as the Web); the history of the Internet looks like a Pod People or Borg plot where a more diverse ecosystem is consumed and replaced by a single all-consuming entity that gradually assimilates all distinct individuals. What we lost in diversity we gained in losing bizarre email gateways, I suppose. But languages are meant to be written to actual, real-world, written down standards, right? No possibility of friction when moving from one compiler to another, right?