The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure version 2.7
has just been released. It includes a new open source BSD licensed C/C++ compiler, clang. “This includes significantly better generated code, improvements to debug information generation and a broad number of new features in the core infrastructure. One exciting feature is that Clang is now able to bootstrap itself, a major milestone in any compiler’s development and particularly notable considering the complexity of implementing C++!” LLVM also has a new official blog.
Very nice, great seeing Clang now compiles itself. Time to try it on some of the things 2.6 failed at to see if they compile now, and of course see what improvements has been done in the area of optimizations.
From some of the other reviews I’ve seen (Phoronix did a good one last week), performance has improved, though generally remains behind the more mature GCC. In most tests, the LLVM-compiled binaries were significantly slower, but it came out ahead on one or two cases…
They didn’t use any of the special features of it and compiling and benching some silly applications like the old unixbench etc. isn’t really of any value.
I’m sure a more a mature compiler can do better, for now, in many things. But, even with that…it’s Phoronix, which has a long and proud history of taking what could be excellent performance tests, but then just throwing it all randomly at the internet, instead of isolating what should be tested, how, and why, in a way that will matter to users.
LLVM is not going to kill off GCC, or anything, but I’ve gotten rather leery of trusting Phoronix.
Edited 2010-04-30 04:17 UTC