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Somebody needs to step up to save Clang now that Google has more or less abandoned it.
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Somebody needs to step up to save Clang now that Google has more or less abandoned it.
- saagarjha 4y agoGoogle uses Clang for much of its production code and employs people to work on it. I don’t think saying that they’ve abandoned it is accurate.
- moloch-hai 4y agoI hope you are right.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stusmall 4y agoIt's been a (very) long time since I worked in Android OS land but at the time I could see effects of them actively moving projects from GCC to Clang. I always picked up the outsider impression that it was their preferred C++ toolchain. First I've heard of them abandoning it
- moloch-hai 4y agoThere is a big push for their proprietary language "Carbon". Clang is way behind on implementing most C++20 features.
- smoldesu 4y agoWell, let this be a lesson to anyone who tries competing with a GPL product. Permissive licenses are cool up until the moment a FAANG company embraces your project, extends it and extinguishes it.
- stusmall 4y agoThat's an early stage, pre-production, experimental language. They are still a couple years out from a 1.0. They aren't moving away from clang for that anytime soon and they sure haven't abandoned clang for it. Also it isn't even proprietary[1] 1. https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/LICENSE https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/LI...
- cyber_kinetist 4y agoWell, but I’ve heard that many of the Clang people from Google have switched their gears to work on Carbon, so that might be quite an issue for future Clang development (even if Carbon is in the early stages). I think the possibility is that the Google engineers will do bugfixes for up to C++17 features but will minimize work on catching up to the latest standards (since it really takes up too much engineering effort, and Google seems to be conservative in using newer C++ features anyway and have opinions that differ from the standards.)
- menaerus 4y ago> Clang is way behind on implementing most C++20 features. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support#cpp20 https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support#cpp20 begs to differ. The heck, even C++23 core language support is almost fully done.
- smoldesu 4y agoClang will be fine. It's based on LLVM, which will be actively maintained for as long as Rust exists, and Apple relies on Clang's functionality for pretty much all of their modern tooling. There's enough stakeholders to keep things moving smoothly, at least as far as I can tell.
- cyber_kinetist 4y agoI don’t have any worries on LLVM, since it has become probably the biggest compiler backend with so many languages and tools depending on it. The problem lies within the Clang frontend, where people are worried that it might not catch up to the latest C++ standards since Apple and Google are now looking elsewhere to replace C++ (Swift and Carbon, respectively). Clang not supporting new C++ features actually have some quite far-reaching consequences, since editors nowadays heavily rely on clangd for autocompletion and static analysis, and they too will be stuck past in time.
- bluepizza 4y agoApple and FreeBSD use clang as their main C compiler, no?
- BearOso 4y agoI assume you're referring to Google pushing the Carbon language? That uses LLVM as the backend, so they're basically adding more resources.