Apple departed from GCC mainly for licensing reasons. As GCC 4.2 isthe last version with uses GPLv2,> Apple is stuck with that one until Clang can completely replace GCC. BTW, LLVM-GCC is just a hack (a compiler that uses the GCC front-end and LLVM back-end) until Clang is stable enough. -alex
I am not on top of things regarding the why's, but being in full control of the tool chain is definitelysomething that motivated Apple to go forward w/ LLVM. For example, it was a complicated task to have compiler pluginsin gcc as LLVM has. R.Stallman resisted this new gcc feature for some time, it is now part of the gcc feature set. --Alex - Mtl