LLVM and Clang 3.2 released

For those that follow game development, John Carmack had this to say at QuakeCon 2012:<p><i>"But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongly suspect that the Clang LLVM sort of ecosystem that's living on OS X is going to be, I hope, fertile ground for a whole lot of analysis tools and we'll wind up benefiting by moving more of our platform continuously onto OS X just for that ability to take advantage of additional tools there."</i> [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk#t=45m4s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk#t=45m4s</a>

I love the community of languages that have adopted LLVM as a back-end: <a href="http://llvm.org/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-projects-using-llvm-3-2" rel="nofollow">http://llvm.org/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-...</a><p>Pure, FAUST, Julia, Clay are all very promising and I didn't know about Open Shading Language or Portable OpenCL.<p>[1] <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pure-lang/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/pure-lang/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://faust.grame.fr/" rel="nofollow">http://faust.grame.fr/</a><p>[3] <a href="http://julialang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://julialang.org/</a><p>[4] <a href="http://claylabs.com/clay/" rel="nofollow">http://claylabs.com/clay/</a><p>[5] <a href="https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage/</a><p>[6] <a href="http://pocl.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://pocl.sourceforge.net/</a>

Admittedly, I don't write much C/C++ anymore, but for a recent project, I need to use C. I decided to try clang instead of gcc. When clang showed me exactly what the source (via colors and indicators) of my compilation error I immediately knew that clang is the way forward.

Use this link instead: <a href="http://llvm.org/releases/3.2/docs/ReleaseNotes.html" rel="nofollow">http://llvm.org/releases/3.2/docs/ReleaseNotes.html</a><p>The original link points to some draft version with lots of placeholder text throughout.

Another great LLVM tool that I don't see much press about is scan-build. It does static analysis and lets you navigate the results in your web browser. I believe Xcode builds this in but it's nice for anyone not using an IDE.<p><a href="http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/scan-build.html" rel="nofollow">http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/scan-build.html</a>

Doxygen users will be glad to know that Clang now can syntax check your Doxygen comments.

Anyone using LLVM/Clang on Windows? If so did you have to do anything special to get it to work? I have not really looked into it much myself as the last time I did Windows was basically a no go. Any advice would be great thanks!

Why would one prefer to use LLVM over GCC?

It looks like the Clang binaries for 32-bit Ubuntu try to produce 64-bit executables by default:<p><pre><code> # clang -v clang version 3.2 (tags/RELEASE_32/final) Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu Thread model: posix # clang hello_world.c /usr/include/features.h:324:10: fatal error: 'bits/predefs.h' file not found # clang -m32 hello_world.c # (No error) </code></pre> That's not right, surely?

The highlight of this release for me: built-in support for the ObjFW Objective-C runtime.<p><a href="https://webkeks.org/blog/?5f" rel="nofollow">https://webkeks.org/blog/?5f</a>

Welp, now I had better go update jllvm to 3.2.

Are they?

It went largely unnoticed, but one of the biggest changes of the November Android NDK release was the addition of LLVM/clang to the toolchain. This was primarily added to reduce issues when cross-compiling iOS apps to Android.