When comparing GCC vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends Spacemacs for most people. In the question“What are the best text editors for UNIX-like systems?” Spacemacs is ranked 14th while GCC is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Spacemacs is:
Spacemacs is just a well-configured Emacs distribution with community-sourced best in class plugins and layers selected to take the setup pain out of Emacs. Evil mode gives the Vim bindings and modes for fast editing, while Helm makes everything discoverable to make learning to be more productive simple and unintrusive.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Mature
GCC was first released in 1987 when it was called the GNU C Compiler, a couple of months after it was released it was extended to support C++ too. Nowadays it supports other languages than C or C++.
Having been in use and constant development for more than 20 years it has reached a state of maturity and stability. The fact that it's so old also means that there are countless resources out there for people who want to use it.
Pro Default on many systems
GCC is the default compiler on several systems. Most of the time people have it installed on their machine without even knowing it's there.
Pro Available for even the most obscure hardware
Since it's so old and very popular it has been ported to almost any architecture imaginable. This means that it's probably compatible with even the most obscure and unheard hardware.
Pro Very stable, excellent cross-platform use
Pro Preconfigured emacs distro
Spacemacs is just a well-configured Emacs distribution with community-sourced best in class plugins and layers selected to take the setup pain out of Emacs. Evil mode gives the Vim bindings and modes for fast editing, while Helm makes everything discoverable to make learning to be more productive simple and unintrusive.
Pro VIM Keybindings with EMACS ecosystem
EMACS ecosystem and language support is best in show. The EMACS is a great IDE that was in search of a good text editor. Spacemacs makes EMACS have a good text editor.
Cons
Con Emacs is slow
Emacs is single threaded which means that if you enable all the great features you might be used to from Vim, it will run noticeably slower which can be quite frustrating at times. There are efforts at a concurrent Emacs, but they don't seem to be going anywhere.