The irony of Richard's decision and justification is how misguided it was (and is) on multiple fronts.
First, GCC as a whole has never been technically superior to the commercial competition. The reason why GCC was popular outside the GNU crowd and received as much funded development is that it was the best compiler across a range of popular platforms and had the best price, too.
Second, one of the main drivers behind the creation of clang has been the hostility to making the C/C++ frontend of GCC usable as a standalone tool. Richard explicitly wanted to force everyone to either deal with the GPL and his interpretation of what is derived work, or shell off the bucks for the Edision Design Group. This was a calculated choice as no one would want to invest the time to write another C/C++ frontend, right? He intentionally ignored all other use cases for C/C++ parser as a library (Language server, anyone? Refactoring tools?) and thereby actually hurt the user base on the GNU platform just as well. It can not be understated how disruptive clang was as a set of libraries outside the LLVM/clang compiler.
Third, GCC had as middle and backend compiler always was moderately accessible, but by structure somewhat harder to access for researchers or people wanting on special purpose tools like optimized code generation for computational kernels on matrixes.
GCC was forced to acknowledge the competition by finally getting a plugin interface in the GCC 4.5 days, but at that point, the cat was out of the bag.
First, GCC as a whole has never been technically superior to the commercial competition. The reason why GCC was popular outside the GNU crowd and received as much funded development is that it was the best compiler across a range of popular platforms and had the best price, too.
Second, one of the main drivers behind the creation of clang has been the hostility to making the C/C++ frontend of GCC usable as a standalone tool. Richard explicitly wanted to force everyone to either deal with the GPL and his interpretation of what is derived work, or shell off the bucks for the Edision Design Group. This was a calculated choice as no one would want to invest the time to write another C/C++ frontend, right? He intentionally ignored all other use cases for C/C++ parser as a library (Language server, anyone? Refactoring tools?) and thereby actually hurt the user base on the GNU platform just as well. It can not be understated how disruptive clang was as a set of libraries outside the LLVM/clang compiler.
Third, GCC had as middle and backend compiler always was moderately accessible, but by structure somewhat harder to access for researchers or people wanting on special purpose tools like optimized code generation for computational kernels on matrixes.
GCC was forced to acknowledge the competition by finally getting a plugin interface in the GCC 4.5 days, but at that point, the cat was out of the bag.