My guess is that cc is a broken compiler on many exotic operating system
(or at least was when the ./configure was first written in the nineties),
and in particular does not support the (modest) gcc extensions that the
runtime relies on. Using a standardized (yet portable) compiler was deemed
an easier path to configure the OCaml distribution build system than trying
to support the oddities of every Unix's C compiler under the sun.

Note that the compiler distribution builds just fine under MacOS, which now
uses Clang (llvm) instead of GCC -- and that you can configure the C
compiler you want to use with (./configure -cc ...). I don't see what is
the problem here; and I would think that opting to choose GCC by default is
still a perfectly reasonable choice today.



On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 5:05 PM, Christopher Zimmermann <
christopher@gmerlin.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> the Ocaml configure script uses gcc as default compiler. I wonder
> whether this is still a sensible default with llvm being a viable
> alternative.
> A more portable default would be to use plain `cc`, which will usually
> be the system-wide default compiler.
> This is relevant because this compiler will also be hardcoded into
> ocamlopt as default c compiler.
>
> Christopher
>
>
> --
> http://gmerlin.de
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