One example would be integrating the compiler with its own custom tools. Whether or not you consider this to be a sabotaged version depends on if you believe BSD-licensed source code suddenly disappears from existence the moment a company uses it for something.

One of the FreeBSD developers gave a talk about this. FreeBSD has commercial users, and the new GCC just wouldn't have been an option for them. The older license-compatible version still in FreeBSD wasn't receiving updates, and it was beginning to affect developers too greatly.

Whether this compiler switch is a good thing or not depends on how much you hate the idea of commercial vendors using open source. GCC's strictness is admiral from an ideological perspective, but certainly not from a practical one. It should be noted that even Linus Torvalds adheres to a more pragmatic worldview:

It's pretty damning when Linus himself no longer refers to Linux as free software because he doesn't like the extremism of the free software movement. And why should he? He's an engineer, not a religious fundamentalist.

I've heard positive and negative claims regarding this. Certainly, Apple thinks it's production-ready (I think it was Xcode 4.2 that they stopped shipping GCC). Do you have a link showing that generated code is significantly worse? Which versions were compared?

Clang and FreeBSD aren't proprietary software. They're BSD-licensed open source. That code doesn't magically disappear when a company uses it.

Having all this great open source compiler technology competing with each other is great, but one does wonder if the alienation caused by GPLv3 was worth it, as it is the primary reason both Apple and FreeBSD embraced Clang (in fact, Apple started the Clang project). As a result, GCC wasn't updated past GPLv2 on either platform. Apple couldn't integrate GCC with their IDE like they wanted, nor could FreeBSD's commercial clients work with it. Flexibility and pragmatism usually wins out over rigidness and ideology.

But you said Bitcoin has "unparalleled transparency."

How much unreported fraud do you think occurs at Bitcoin companies like Mt. Gox, and what would make Bitcoin companies so special that they would be immune to such dishonesty, especially considering that they're unregulated?

So you think a victim down $87,000 worth of Internet Fun Bucks should be satisfied with some libertarian reply about the free market correcting itself?

Ironically, Bitcoin serves as a pretty good argument that there should be substantial regulation of financial service providers since people that don't know computers keep losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It doesn't matter how the second instance is allocated (string literals are created at compile-time, so they exist for the duration of the program). All that matters is the ownership rules which state that you own neither of the objects. Additionally, ARC can optimize autoreleased objects so that they don't enter the autorelease pool.

Creating mutable instances is as simple as sending a -mutableCopy message to the collection literal, just as you can already do with string literals: [@"blah" mutableCopy]

Signed,
Jimmy Gianato, West Virginia Homeland Security Chief

The most hilarious part is when Gianaro defended it in the name of " equal opportunity"' : "A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students."

WTF? Does he really thing the technology works like that...the bigger the router, the bigger the opportunity?

This seems to weaken their "algorithmically neutral" defense against antitrust scrutiny regarding the placement of Google services on the search results page. Perhaps they're testing the waters for abandoning that position in favor of this one, sidestepping antitrust charges entirely by citing free speech protection. I'm not sure governments would find that convincing, especially the EU. Honestly, if Google toned down the pushing of Google+ and other services in search results (or included clearly relevant results like Twitter and Facebook), they'd probably be in less hot water, but they seem to feel they have no other way to compete with social networking.

What more surprises does this venerable language have up its sleeve?

Clang recently added literal syntax for collections and boxed numbers:

// Old way.
NSArray *array = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"one", @"two", @"three", nil];
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
                                            @"bar", @"foo",
                                            @"post", @"first",
                                            nil];
NSNumber *num = [NSNumber numberWithInteger:42]; // New way.
NSArray *array = @[ @"one", @"two", @"three" ];
NSDictionary *dict = @{
                                              @"foo" : @"bar",
                                              @"first": @"post"
                                            };
NSNumber *num = @42;

Properties will also be synthesized by default, so you won't have to write @synthesize statements anymore, and corresponding ivars will be synthesized with an underscore prefixed name.

Objective-C is interesting to follow because it's a language that was once considered totally niche and almost completely irrelevant, but the frameworks were beloved by developers, and the language's keepers kept at it long enough for the world to see how useful the language is. It also has historical significance as the tools used for creation of the original WorldWideWeb program as well as the development of Doom and Quake. John Romero wrote about he and Carmack simultaneously editing the same map in DoomEd thanks to distributed objects.

It's still verbose and Smalltalk-ish, but the language as a whole has improved drastically since the transition to Clang. According to the mailing list, Apple has more engineers allocated to the language than ever before, and a lot of it has to do with the move away from GCC.

I hear that GCC is working toward being easier to modify, so the competition from Clang has been good for everybody, and it's all open source.