My God! It's full of ports!
I keep on experimenting with FreeBSD 8.0 and, you know what? It's full of ports!
You have ports for everything. And in all sort of flavors and versions.
Take, for instance, DocBook: just for this you have twenty-three different docbook flavors and versions! From DocBook 2.41 to the latest docbook 5.0!! That's software, isn't it?
As a plus I can compile stuff in parallel, as FreeBSD guys have been busy making sure those more than twenty one thousand software ports can be compiled in parallel in multicore chips.
On LLVM
As you may have noticed the LLVM project has been honored with the SIGPLAN's first Programming Languages Software Award.
The good news is that FreeBSD is moving away from GCC (due to GPL-v3) into clang/llvm so in the future I imagine FreeBSD users will enjoy faster compilation times (and some extra benefits, as better debuggers, static analysis etc.).
LLVM is an interesting project in the programming languages area. Lua, for instance, can be run in the LLVM virtual machine, and so can be run Fortran/C/C++ and any other GCC supported language. Java is supported in the vmkit project, and even though it's in early stages it's good to know there're alternative JVM implementations out there.
Happy FreeBSD-ing,
Antonio
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