Today is the day that FreeBSD moves to using clang by default. This is not necessarily a surprise, but I like the finality of calling it “Clang-Day”. I think Clang will probably be the next compiler brought into DragonFly’s base system, instead of the next release of gcc. Don’t make any bets on my statement, though, cause I certainly won’t be the one doing it. (It’s hard.)
6 Replies to “Clang-Day today for FreeBSD”
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Gotta say, “Clang-Day” does sound pretty awesome.
>>”It’s hard”
What’s “hard”?
What’s hard is to build a 30ish year old codebase that has been using GCC for two thirds of that time and relies on GCC extensions with a completely different compiler that only in the last couple years has become viable for building complete operating systems, while making sure that the result not only boots, but hasn’t introduced subtle or explosively obvious bugs.
My offer to maintain Clang in DragonflyBSD base as the shadow compiler and/or default still stands because I know Clang’s code base well, its very flat and easy to understand.
I have fixed things upstream in Clang/LLVM a few years ago for Dragonfly if you guys recall when I had commit bit.
I am happy to continue if its not just me working away in some corner..
Kind regards,
Edward.
Edward – it’s nice to say you are making an offer, but there’s no offer/accept process, so it doesn’t translate to anything. You have to present patches or something else tangible for people to react to. (and clang works now)
Edward, we have been discussing shipping clang _with_ base (but not specifically as part of it) for DragonFly 3.4 as a pkgsrc package. The holdup for this is mostly stuff in base, not clang, we would want world/kernel to build and work (world does not build at this time) and cross-builds to work.
I (personally, it is not a consensus) would like to avoid maintaining the compilers in base altogether and clang would provide a great test-bed for this.