As far as I'm concerned, LLVM's design-for-backend- and frontend-portability was much better since day one than GCC's ever was, or will be, unless GCC adopts a design similar to LLVM.

I don't know how much have things improved since 4.4.0, but when talking about ports to new machine architectures, porting llvm today is really a walk in the park compared to porting gcc back then. It may be simply because the C++ idioms are much higher level and steer my understanding better than the lower level C idioms. But well, given that a lot of LLVM backend-specific stuff is under documented, and a lot of gcc backend-specific stuff is not documented at all, one had to read and understand the code. LLVM code reads much easier, I think.

A lot of gcc has been reworked over the years, and recent code is nothing like gcc from 10 years ago. But, it's still written mostly in C, and that's just a very royal pain to deal with, after a while. If you use C++ properly, going back to C feels like having a 5 year old for a coworker. Suddenly, there's a lot of handholding required.

Only because you're going about it full-retard.

Your contractor can use your software without your software actually leaving your door, in the meaning of "distribution" as it applies to GPL. There are multiple ways of doing it. Machines owned by your company but placed on contractor premises, or SaaS, are just two ways of dealing with it You need a better lawyer/advisor/consultant, that's all.

If you're a software-as-a-service provider, then this doesn't matter at all, and most people who do php-this-or-that just run it on their servers. Putting GPL code on servers you control is not distribution, so GPL doesn't apply to it at all.

I think that demonstrably you're just an astronomical troll since what you say is provably untrue. It only takes one counterexample. Qt is a big, cross-platorm framework available under GPL, LGPL and a commercial license.

I don't know if you're just trolling, but having to freely give out the source code is not the same as being prohibited from making money on the software. I'd hope it's obvious. RedHat does just fine.

It only has to do with distribution. As an end user, you can do whatever you wish.

Complicated? How? Internally you simply compile your code into an .a/.lib, then link statically with the LGPLd libraries, as you please. The customer must be able to get the .lib from you, and the build script used to build the LGPL library and link it with the .lib. That's all. It's really simple.

LLVM was started as an academic project. I don't recall if the clang frontend was started by Apple or not, but the whole thing cannot be dissected like you do. No, Apple is not the upstream, and clang is just a frontend.

I can only speak from experience, and porting LLVM backend to a new architecture seems to be downright easy compared with gcc - at least last time I took a stab at a gcc port, it was right as 4.4.0 got out.

$850 a year - the heck? For our cat, we pay about $110 for yearly checkup/vaccination, and that's it. An occasional infection/irritation with steroids+antiobiotic was another $80 or so. That's in a US city of more than a million, BTW.

That's one of the most informative posts for today. Thank you!

If your dog was healthy, it wouldn't need that much attention either. Worms in dogs and cats is a very common thing. If you did what dogs do, you'd have worms too.

The interesting thing is: I have seriously not noticed the rendering engine switch!