> clang was sponsored exactly to allow Google and Apple to take a compiler and not be legally obliged to upstream their sauce.
Sponsored is an understatement. It was pretty much entirely funded by those two, so if the goal was to leech on volunteers, that would be a pretty bad move by those companies.
The goal was not to give anything back as expected by GCC and GPL, especially the at the time relatively new GPL3.
Which is exactly what happened after clang got mature enough, GCC was expunged from their platforms.
Apple first, followed by Google about a year later.
Note that nowadays, Apple clang has its own column on cppreference, Google is focused on Carbon/Rust/Go, and both cases most of the contributions are on LLVM side, not clang and ISO compliance.
I totally get that avoiding GPL3.0 was the goal for Apple (less so for Google I'd say). If avoiding "giving anything back" were the goal they have fucked up on that. Regardless, the point is they could have pretty much done proprietary software and kept it for themselves too and no one would complain. It's not somehow a brilliant conspiracy to leech off of the measly volunteer base when they have paid the majority of development costs.
P.S. you focus on ISO compliance. Could it be that the actual user base does not really care about it as much as the rest of the aspects of the compiler (features, correctness, performance) and thus deprioritized by everyone. I don't consider clang abandoned by Google or Apple.
What matters is actually who puts the effort into bringing clang into modern times, regardless of your opinion Github is there for tracking purposes, who contributes what.
Also clang was only one example of who profits and who puts into the work, like the endless number of PhD students contributing to LLMV or MLIR.
Yes, I just briefly clicked at the top contributors. As expected they are mostly not homeless PhD students. All big ones are employed or have been employed by Apple/Google/RedHat/SiFive/Sony, often multiple of those. (Did you actually look or just spreading your hunches?)
If you think it's the long tail of endless contributions is what makes a production quality open source project like clang tick, well, we disagree...
(In fact such PhD students are often the prime beneficiaries of the work by commercial companies, because they get to build their research stuff on top of LLVM.)
This thread keeps having its goal posts moved around, first is was an example, then got the spotlight of being only about clang, then I pointed out about Apple/Google original purposes, then it was something else, and yet another one.
Just head off to /r/cpp that is where hunches are coming from.
Have you at very least filtered by C++ clang only related contributions instead of LLVM ones?
Yes, as I acknowledged I did not spend time digging in who wrote which exact patch or sift through some loudmouths on /r/cpp whining about things. The burden to substantiate your argument at this point is chiefly on you. I have spent enough time on this already. You can narrow things down to some area that you care about specifically, but I am fairly certain Google and Apple each spend tens of millions of dollars a year, if not 100+, on the LLVM project at large. Are you suggesting this $$$ figure is wrong?
To contextualize, I have been one of those PhD student in the exact same space who used clang/libtooling in a past life, as well as a maintainer of a sufficiently popular corporate open source projects, and I do have my own hunches on how much exactly random "volunteer contribution" is often worth (hint: it is mostly extra pain for the maintainers to review).
The irony is if Apple closed it up for themselves as proprietary software in the first place, they would not have received that criticism. If you start open sourcing, you will be treated with a much different, IMHO unfair, benchmark.
Before LLVM, much of the PL research prototype would be done on Java with some research JVM crap because it was hard to do it in the real world with native code, so I could the academics beneficiaries not among the abused.
Sponsored is an understatement. It was pretty much entirely funded by those two, so if the goal was to leech on volunteers, that would be a pretty bad move by those companies.