Interesting. This has not been my experience at all.

I had to fight for days to get MacPorts to install anything properly. It gives me flashbacks to the horrors from 3-4 years ago of compiling open source software on Linux.

Homebrew has been fuzzy kittens in comparison.

I'm a relatively new Mac user and never used MacPorts. When I search brew I get these results:

$ brew search gcc

apple-gcc42 gcc

homebrew/versions/gcc45 homebrew/versions/llvm-gcc28

I'm a bit confused since I thought that these are gcc. Can someone tell me what those results mean? :S

This is the way to go:

    $ brew tap homebrew/dupes
    $ brew install gcc --enable-all-languages

To use your new gcc-4.7.2 when installing new packages just add '--use-gcc' at the end of the command.

Hahah don't be naive. Use homebrew. Macports has been broken for years.

clang is better than gcc, IMO

> clang is better than gcc, IMO

Maybe. Maybe not. But I don't think that's the reason homebrew doesn't have gcc. The OP is pointing out homebrew isn't extensive, and misses some commonly used utilities.

clang either does not build or defectively builds certain things on OS X, for instance Ruby 1.9.3. I had to acquire vanilla GCC for this reason the other day, and was relieved to find it in HomeBrew.

Old-ass versions of Clang would build Ruby and PostgreSQL (client) binaries which would segfault upon execution. Try grabbing the latest XCode/command line tools package and you should be fine. I've been running Ruby 1.9.3 with Clang for quite a while.

brew install rbenv ruby-build; /* rc file shenanigans */; rbenv install 1.9.3-p327; rbenv global 1.9.3-p327; ruby --version

Ruby 1.9.3 working fine here and built with clang. What was defective?

By what metric?