Notes from Talk

C++ is taking off
But not the Tool chains are not

Distribution support

Debian: GCC 6, clang 3.8
Ubuntu LTS: GCC 5, clang 3.8
RHEL : GCC 4.8, clang: Nope!

What happens with the bug

Stacked release cycles.
- wait the tool chain to update.
- Wait for the distro to update.
similarly find the bug and report the bug.
wait for the next release of the toolchain.
wait for the fixed toolchain to be available.

Solution

Need to develop toolchain in-house?
It is hard to develop.
Many are closed source and proprietary.
But open-source compilers are hard to hack on.
need to build binutils, GDB, etc.
Debug miscompiles

Impossible!

What is llvm?

Open source moduler collection of compiler & toolchain infrastructure.
includes code generation, optimization, linker and loader.
Written in C++.
clang is a front-end and there are other frontends.

What can you do with LLVM?

code generation for DSLs.
traditional copilers for general purpose languages.
Developer or editor tools for static analysis, refactoring.

LLVM has bugs!

Since LLVM is written in C++ so one can hack on LLVM to contribute for opensource community.
There are lot of tools that come with LLVM that are super useful for developers like clang-tidy, clang-format, thinlto.