geeky OT stuff: clang 5 vs. gcc 7.2

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

Maybe only sideways related (it could affect how well KDevelop is built?):

I just noticed LLVM 5.0 (actually -almost- 5.0.1) packages for my system on LLVM.org and could resist installing them to get my own idea what that intriguing major version step is all about. All I can say at the moment is that building with "-O3 -g" leads to significantly more compact binaries using clang than using GCC. Comparisons on sites like phoronix often suggest significant advantages to using clang both in build times and performance of the resulting binaries but I've rarely been able to reproduce that. The contrary, rather, and as far as I can tell even build times are somewhat shorter with GCC 7.2 than with clang 4.0 .

What are the experiences here? In particular, is there a noticeable advantage to building KDevelop with clang (be it 5 or 4 but I'd be curious to know also if clang 5 is really better than 4 in real life).

Thanks,

R.