As this essay discusses, GCC has serious technical flaws. LLVM is one of the best examples I've ever seen of "the best way to complain is to make things." That and the iPhone.
It is said that these "flaws" are deliberate in GCC, to prevent it being reused as a component (e.g. as a syntax highlighting engine) in someone else's IDE that hides that it's using GCC under the hood.
Wow, so they're actively preventing progress for political reasons? Why don't they try to solve their ideological licensing problems with, I don't know, licensing solutions? Crippling the underlying technology doesn't seem like a very hacker thing to do...
