On the subject of clang

My coworker has been burdened with the task of building our product for Apple devices, which, it turns out, means that he has to use clang instead of gcc. On discovering this I did a couple of laps around the room shouting "EXTERMINATE" but when I settled down I wondered if there was a reason they used this. Is this just apple being hipsters or is there a reason to switch compilers?

>>11
No, I meant compiler.

In the case of GCC, if you want to e.g. target ARM from x86 you have to build a compiler specifically for that from the GCC sources (i.e. the compiler target architecture is a build time option)

In the case of Clang, it always targets LLVM. The target architecture is a per invocation option for LLVM. You do not have to rebuild LLVM to target different architectures, you just invoke it with different options.

Your program will always have to be rebuilt to target a different architecture, in both cases. There have been efforts to make ``fat'' executable formats, (i.e. where the same file has machine code for various architectures and then a pointer for the loader) but AFAIK there has been little agreement between vendors.