LLVM has done some great things, but I strongly dislike it's license. "Source code under the NCSA license can be incorporated into proprietary products without the reciprocity requirements that copyleft free software licenses raise." -LLVM Wikipedia
For this reason, I will continue to use GCC wherever possible. Not completely on topic, but I just wanted to make the point so that people understand that some of us actually do make decisions not purely from pragmatic standpoints.
Clang's an important project if for one reason that is slowly starting to gain footage in GCC. Everything's callable outside of the compiler. You can have the compiler loop in your IDE, for example, and take advantage of its AST manipulation for better refactoring, its unidentified behavior sanitizer to immediately get a warning when you're heading into the tall grass, etc. GCC is stymied on this part by more conservative elements of their leadership that don't want to expose this behavior that is a growing necessity in code development.
Even if one insists on sticking with gcc on ideological grounds, one should be glad clang exists because it seems to have lit a fire under the maintainers.
The ideological reason to use GCC is to prevent clang/llvm from succeeding, which will drive everyone toward a copyleft product (GCC), which will encourage reciprocity.
Your observation is no consolation for someone who subscribes to that ideology.
(Personally, I do not subscribe to that ideology.)
That's great, everybody should use whatever licenses they like, but you're implying that people who don't choose the GPL do it purely from 'pragmatism'. There are plenty of people who choose non-GPL licenses for philosophical and idealistic reasons, and plenty of people who choose the GPL for purely pragmatic business reasons. Your preferences here don't make you any more idealistic or high-minded than anyone else. No one has a moral high ground in the open source world, as much as some people would like to think they do.
This is a straw man, in the sense that there is a very big difference between "purely on ideologic standpoints" and "not purely pragmatic". A difference that seems obvious if you are interested in intellectualy honest discussion.
OK, you fail to grasp the mechanics here, I think. The NCSA allows you to incorporate NCSA code into your work, which you can then release under GPL if you so choose. What is your beef with that?
For this reason, I will continue to use GCC wherever possible. Not completely on topic, but I just wanted to make the point so that people understand that some of us actually do make decisions not purely from pragmatic standpoints.