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ueckertoday at 8:59 PM2 repliesview on HN

GCC was implemented in C and there are plenty of other C compilers written in C. GCC has been converted to C++ at some point, but large parts are still essentially C and I do not think the change to C++ was actually helpful (but others may disagree). In any case, the idea that one needs C++ to have C compilers is certainly simply wrong.


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delta_p_delta_xtoday at 9:07 PM

Clang/LLVM with its more permissive licence sees _much_ wider use and is written purely in C++. PlayStation, automotive, platforms and runtimes like Chromium/V8, Android, etc. are all built with Clang.

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pjmlptoday at 9:17 PM

Naturally GCC was originally written in C, given its age, and the original GNU coding standards document.

With time, the GCC developers acknowledged the benefits of using C++ over C, and migrated the code.

GCC requires a C++ compiler to bootstrap since around 2012, and GNU coding standards has been updated to several languages beyond C, time to go up with times.

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