Well, at this point Clang is the one more likely to create a monoculture, not GC...

chungy · on Feb 13, 2020

Probably doubtful. I bet GCC is used at least 10× as much as Clang.

comex · on Feb 13, 2020

GCC is still dominant in the desktop Linux world and embedded. But Clang is the default compiler for:

- Apple platforms

- Android (at least for the NDK used by third-party developers)

- PS4

- Nintendo Switch

- WebAssembly (there's no official "default", but GCC doesn't support it)

- eBPF (at least, GCC didn't support it until a few months ago)

Oh, and Google uses Clang to build Chromium for all of its supported platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).

pjmlp · on Feb 13, 2020

Android is fully clang nowadays, Google's fork of Linux kernel has been cleaned from GCC dependencies.

There were a couple of talks about it a couple of years ago.

2017 LLVM Developers’ Meeting: “Compiling Android userspace and Linux kernel with LLVM", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l4DtR5exwo

EDIT: typo and link for the mentioned talks.

pjmlp · on Feb 13, 2020

Not really, clang is very appealing for companies that aren't willing to give all their crown jewels to upstream.

Everyone that can move away from basing their toolchains has already moved into clang, or is in process of doing so.