Seems to have a decent amount of knowledge in this domain in education and professional work. Author is from MIT so maybe professors had a lot of influence here.

also, gcc is relatively old and comes with a lot of baggage. LLVM is sort of the defacto standard now with improvements in performance

> LLVM is sort of the defacto standard now...

Distributions, and therefore virtually all the software used by a distribution user, still generally use gcc. LLVM is only the de facto standard when doing something new, and for JIT.

as someone who uses both Clang and GCC to cover eachothers weaknesses, as far as I can tell both LLVM and GCC are hopelessly beastly codebases in terms of raw size and their complexity. I think that's just what happens when people desire to build an "everything compiler".

From what I gathered, LLVM has a lot of C++ specific design choices in its IR language anyway. I think I'd count that as baggage.

I personally don't think one is better than the other. Sometimes clang produces faster code, sometimes gcc. I haven't really dealt with compiler bugs from either. They compile my projects at the same speed. Clang is better at certain analyses, gcc better at certain others.