what of the less obvious things don't have direct alternatives? autotools is a good example I think. and I guess gdb.
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LLVM has a debugger, but see my above remarks. Autotools lacks a direct alternative because most of what it does is just wrong and doesn't need to be done at all.
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Google is far from controlling LLVM. They were contributing a comparable amount to GCC, binutils, etc. back when they still used it and before they'd decided to migrate to LLVM.
The binutils replacements were a lot more focused on macOS and Windows before caring about Linux too.
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LLVM donated their branding to a stupid toy project of Google's just because Google wanted them to. They are controlled by Google.
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The libc project fits into the overall ambitions of LLVM beyond Google.
They're very open to incubating those projects and accepting substantial code drops from big companies.
LLD and LLDB are pretty good examples. Originally, it wasn't clear LLD would do serious Linux support.
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I don't think it actually does, but even if it did, the proposal to do it did not fit with LLVM project at all and was purely something of Google's imagination.
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libcxx.llvm.org, libcxxabi.llvm.org and compiler-rt.llvm.org have been part of LLVM for a long time.
It makes sense to me that they'd want a libc implementation when they have a C++ standard library, C++ runtime and low-level runtime.
I think it fits into it.
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No, but as another example I could easily see them making a Java AOT / JIT compiler, Java standard library implementation, debugger, etc. I could see Google being the main sponsors of that work too. I could also see them maintaining the userspace portion of GPU drivers.
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Or, as another example, I could see LLVM having a permissive licensed alternative to QEMU. A lot of the infrastructure for software emulation of architectures with hardware acceleration is already present. It's a much broader project than a compiler. It always was to some extent.
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Part of what that would mean is having it available as a library, not simply a tool. That's part of what you get from Clang, LLD, LLDB, etc. They're permissively licensed libraries not simply tools.
LLVM is in the situation WebKit would be if Apple & Google had worked together.
So, as an example, you can write a C binding generation tool (like rust-bindgen) using libclang. You can write a debugger with liblldb as a library. It can be proprietary, since it's permissively licensed.
RMS essentially sparked the whole thing. All leads back to crippling GCC.
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I pretty strongly disagree there. RMS is an asshole in his treatment of people and ineffective in Free Software strategy, but all the stuff you cited that LLVM is making is stuff that should not have been in GCC and should not be made.
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