When comparing GCC vs Howl, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best text editors for UNIX-like systems?” Howl is ranked 19th while GCC is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Howl is:
You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.
Specs
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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 Keyboard driven
You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.
Pro Fast startup
It's extremely lightweight, making it start up pretty quickly.
Pro Easy to use
Howl is very intuitive and easy to use.
Pro Easy to extend
Plugins (bundles) can be written in Lua or MoonScript.
Pro UI Focused on editting
Non distracted icons, toolbars, pannels, extra spacing, etc.
Pro Language tooling
Has built-in functionality for completion, inline documentation and linting so IDE-like features can be added easily.
Pro Command line palette
Search for your commands in an easy way and see in the list which key-strokes are mapped to which commands
Pro Open source
Howl is an open source project and is actively developed on GitHub(howl-editor/howl). It has a MIT license.
Pro Works on OpenBSD
Cons
Con Lack of Lua examples
Although Howl can be extended in both Lua and MoonScript, almost all bundles are written in MoonScript. This means that it is a bit harder to find examples if you'd rather write your bundle in Lua. MoonScript can be compiled to Lua but the code won't be as clean and understandable as if it would've been written in Lua by hand.