2. Despite many versions of GCC beyond 4.2 having been released,
Apple uses no GCC code more recent than 4.2 in released products.
Until Xcode 3.0 they didn't even using anything more recent than
4.0.1. Apple is always a few versions behind gcc mainline, since they
have to reintegrate a bunch of changes from their branch every time
they upgrade.
4. LLVM has totally permissive licensing. Allowing proprietary
forks and just about anything else.
Which will, the way things are currently going, probably result in
even more NDA madness. Currently, gcc cannot be NDAd/restricted thanks
to the GPL, so at least it is legally possible to make a compiler
which produces code for the iPhone because its ABI documentation (in
the form of the gcc source code) is legally available. If it were
completely llvm-based, you can bet that would still be covered by the
NDA as well.
Of course, the iPhone SDK headers are still under NDA so unless you
can parse C/Objective-C headers (which of course is the majority out
there, but there are also other niche markets) you're still out of
luck since you can't legally distribute translated API's.
It's really is becoming increasingly harder to support Apple platforms
with a third party compiler, because of the evolution to more and more
lockdowns (moving away from open source/free software to more
something like Microsoft's "shared source" concept, which is nice as
long as you only want to look at things, but which breaks down
horribly very soon if you want to do more).
Jonas
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