I wouldn't be surprised if the folks at the project abandoned their branch of gcc in order not to be "tainted by association". There is a revulsion to C++ that is close to the core to OpenBSD's philosophy. Perhaps pcc or clang will get more attention.
The people in the OpenBSD project seem pretty happy with their toolchain. pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress. Making a really good c compiler is hard and I don't think they have the people or interest at this time.
I don't think they would switch to clang. LLVM is also c++.
>pcc was removed from the source tree due to lack of progress.
That's a shame. PCC seemed an interesting alternative to gcc, though I do recall PCC's v1.0 "revival" coinciding with an April Fools day several years ago. Perhaps it always was to be taken as a joke.
OpenBSD's simplicity in implementation is laudable. The less moving parts there are the less parts there are to break. It's the same philosophy that keeps me driving my 25-year old pickup.
I am not sure they are happy. They have the C++ compiler written in C that they want, but:
- they have to maintain their own gcc version (the last GPL2 one)
- the licensing for clang and LLVM fits the BSDs better than the licensing for gcc.
If they want to keep the ability to bootstrap from a C compiler, they should consider creating a good C backend (configurable with such things as the size of a long) for LLVM. That way, they could convert any C++ code (including clang and LLVM) to C, and thus bootstrap a C++ compiler on a system that only has a C compiler.
But if GCC is now C++ as well, then it removes what may have been the motivating characteristic to use it, when clang is for many purposes an otherwise better, more freely licensed, compiler.
