Sylvestre's blog

Using the AWS donation, David Suarez and myself have been able to rebuild the whole archive with Clang 3.4.
The rebuild has been done January 10th but, with my new job, I did not find the time to publish the result.
Releases after releases, the results are getting better and better.

Currently, 2193 packages in the archive are failing to build from source.
That is roughly the same number of build failures as with the precedent rebuild with Clang 3.3.
However, this is good news for two reasons:
* the number of new packages in Debian increased (18854 at time of the 3.3 release, 21204 for the 3.4)
* clang 3.4 has more checks and error detections.

I also started to update clang to make it closer to gcc. For example, I transformed wrong usage of -O (> 6) error to be treated as regular warning.

However, a critical bug has emerged during this release. When using -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 (which is the case of many Debian packages), the binaries produced freeze (infinity loop in the ASM). This has been reported upstream as bug 16821 and concerns about 150 packages (including Firefox, gcc, LLVM, etc). Hopefully, this will be fixed in 3.5 (this is unlikely for 3.4.1).

About the new build failures, now, Clang triggers an error (or warning + -Werror) on:

* Wrong usage of the default argument (should be done in the definition)
16 occurrences

* Usage of C++11 feature without the appropriate argument
7 occurrences

* Unused static const declaration
5 occurrences

* Recursive template instantiation exceeded
4 occurrences

* Defitinion of a builtin function
3 occurrences

* Read-only variable is not assignable
2 occurrences

By the way, I proposed a Google Summer of Code Project to work faster on a support of Debian built by Clang. As requirements, I asked students to fix some bugs, they already did a great job.

Just a small blog post to LLVM developers that the automatic scan-build reports on LLVM+Clang+LLDB+compiler-rt are now run using LLVM nightly.

That brings few advantages:
* New checks quickly available for the LLVM developer community
* Quick feedbacks for scan-build developers on the whole code base
* Automatic testing of the packages generated

I made some changes on http://llvm.org/apt/ for the last 2 months.

• Added trusty, Ubuntu 14.04, as a new supported distribution (on the request of Michael Larabel, Phoronix)

• Support both the stable and development version. Currently, that means that the release_34 branch and the trunk are built. So, for example, clang-3.4 and clang-3.5 can be installed.
  release_34 are only built when a new commit is submitted in this branch. trunk is built twice a day.

• Add a new package llvm-{3.4,3.5}-tools which contains various tools to build software/packages on top of llvm. Contributed by Martin Nowack in the context of Klee.

• Since a C++ 11 compiler is now mandatory, I had to force the usage of a backported gcc/g++ 4.8 (thanks Doko).
  This is the case for Ubuntu Precise (12.04), Quantal (12.10) and raring (13.04).
  The thing is that it triggers a dependency on the libstdc++ 4.8 causing the PPA to be mandatory.
  deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-toolchain-r/test/ubuntu $DISTRIBUTION main
  
  For now, because of the lack of backport of gcc 4.8, I am not providing support for Debian stable (wheezy).

Being a bit hyperactive, I have been involved in the organization of two events. I am the main organizer with Alexandre Delanoë of the Mini Debconf 2014 in Paris, January 18 & 19th.

The (great) planning is available here:
https://france.debian.net/events/minidebconf2014/
Saturday morning presentations will be general public, the beginning of Saturday afternoon will be used by the Debian France association to vote the new status (1901 law and Debian Trusted Organization).
Sunday will be more focused on Debian itself.
During the week end, I will be talking about the Debile project, the finance of Debian France and be part of the round table on compiler selection for Debian.
The (mandatory) registration should be done on the Wiki or meetup.com

In parallel, with Tobias Grosser, we organized the LLVM devroom track at FOSDEM (Bruxelles), February 2nd (Sunday).
The schedule is a mix between core developers, third party software using LLVM / Clang and academic users.
https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/llvm/
I will be talking on how to become a LLVM contributor.

Both events should be recorded.

We just released LLVM & Clang 3.4 (already available in Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Trusty). The clang new release introduces some more warning and error detections. The point of the blog post is not to detail the changes (LLVM / Clang) but more to take a step back on the LLVM and Clang toolchains, usages and dissemination.

For the last couple years, I have been presenting our work on the Debian side to make Clang part of the Debian infrastructure. I add the chance to speak at many events (Debconf 12 & 13, FOSDEM 2013, Linux Plumbers 2013, Distro recipes, etc). I even had Linus Torvalds attending to one of these talks (and proposing new approach). I had many feedback from the Debian/Ubuntu communities but also from other communities.
More and more projects are using Clang as part of their workflows, in term of development, production and QA. For example, some of them are running continuous integration using clang instead of gcc, others are running scan-build (Wireshark or LLVM itself) or Address Sanitizer (asan) (Firefox for example), etc.
More and more actors are moving from gcc to clang for their developments (Sony with their PS4, Chrome under Mac OS X, Apple, the Linux Kernel with the LLVMLinux project, FreeBSD, etc).
I stopped counting the number of times when people answered me "Yeh, I am now using Clang" when I said I am involved upstream.

In parallel, more and more projects are using LLVM as a backend or computing engine and, in the meantime, getting more and more attraction (not because they are based on LLVM but just because they are great projects). For example, Mesa (llvmpipe), Julia, Rust, Emscripten or Native Client (NaCL) are excellent examples of this. The two last are excellent proofs that LLVM based technologies have an impact which goes further than geek-tools and will be used on a daily basis by millions of users.

I also saw an interesting and growing number of new projects using libclang and libTooling. My feeling is that the lack of plugin capabilities in gcc for a long time and, now, its current complexity limited the innovation in term of compilation capabilities, analysis and fun tools. The features and the quality of this library are enabling new developments and I am sure we will see more and more excellent tools based on this library during 2014.
For example, the LLVM toolchain ships Clang modernize and clang format and some cool projects like include-what-you-use, DXR, OCLint or creduce are emerging.

Thanks to this great competition, gcc is also improving (ASAN, JIT, better warnings, etc), remaining still relevant as before. No doubt that 2014 will be a great year for compilers.