Yawn. Look, i'm actually a GCC maintainer. I was heavily involved in GCC development for quite a while, though I now work more on LLVM. I'm still a listed GCC maintainer. I guarantee you, without a doubt, that GCC will die out on its current path.

The only thing that could stop it is if it's no longer an FSF-run project, or the steering committee actually started replacing older members with people still working on GCC, or something else drastic. This would enable folks to do things that currently take a lot of energy to fight about. It may also have to compromise some core values in order to serve the most users.

Yes, LLVM currently lacks optimizations GCC has. But LLVM will do the same thing GCC did to commercial compilers when we started the tree-ssa project, and cherry pick the high end of research, and implement it (it has already started).

As long as GCC stays on the path it is, it will die. It will be a long time, because it has a lot of users. LLVM is friendlier to developers, researchers, and users. GCC can't win any fight as long as that is true.

FWIW: I also don't think most GCC developers harbor any illusions about the above. I think RMS may, or may not be involved enough to care, but nobody seriously involved in GCC thinks that GCC is in "a-ok great shape no problems"

The other possibility, of course, is that LLVM will end up on the same path GCC does, and thus, they will be on the same terms again. I doubt this, since Chris Lattner saw what happened when he tried to merge GCC and LLVM, and despite his flaws, is much more savvy about politics and community policies than GCC is.