
LLVM's Libc++ Now Has C++1Y Standard Library Support 161
An anonymous reader writes "LLVM's libc++ standard library (an alternative to GNU libstdc++) now has full support for C++1y, which is expected to become C++14 next year. Code merged this week implements the full C++1y standard library, with support for new language features in the Clang compiler frontend nearly complete."
GCC has some support for the soon-to-be standard too. The C++ standards committee is expected to produce a more or less final draft in just a few weeks. The LLVM and GCC C++14 status pages both have links to the proposals for the new features.
!GNU/Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that Clang/LLVM has got this finished, I'm wondering what a system would look like with:
* Linux as the kernel
* Clang/LLVM as the system C/C++ compiler
* Heirloom Toolchest as the basic userland toolchain
* Wayland as the underlying display system
* musl as the system C library
That would be Linux, but would contain almost no GNU code. Not that I have anything against GNU, but the Heirloom Toolchest, Clang, and musl are all more standards compliant, smaller, and often faster than their GNU counterparts. I wonder what a Linux distribution like that would look like. I'd use it.
(I hate how "GNU's Not Unix!" is really becoming more and more true. Unix was about minimalism, and sometimes GNU seems like it's about stuffing everything possible into every tool.)
short term thinking is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
it really doesn't matter whether clang/llvm catches up to gcc or not in terms of speed or any other feature.
the crucial issue is what's strategically best for the long term interests of free software, and there is no way in hell that a compiler developed by the Lords of the Walled Garden at Apple is ever going to be a good thing for free software.
Apple's agenda is to sabotage copyleft and the GPL, because they want the benefits they can get from free code from tens of thousands of developers but without having to pay the entirely reasonable price of distributing and freely licensing the source along with any modified binaries.
The fact that Apple has been - and still is - smarter than Microsoft in their anti-free-software campaign just highlights how dangerous they are. Microsoft took the stupid head-on approach to attacking free software. Apple's method has been stealthy subversion and erosion of principles. smart, competent evil is far worse than stupid, incompetent evil.