tldr: The percentage of failure is decreasing, Clang support is improving but there is a long way to go.
The goal of this initiative is to rebuild Debian using Clang as a compiler instead of gcc. I have been doing this analysis for the last 6 years.
Recently, we rebuilt the archive of the Debian archive with Clang 3.9.1 (July 6th), 4.0.1 (July 6th) and 5.0 rc2 (August 20th).
For various reasons, we didn't perform a rebuild since June 2016 with version 3.8. Therefor, we took the opportunity to do three over the last month.
Now, the 3.9 & 4.0 results are impacted by a build failure when building all haskell packages (the -no-pie option in Clang doesn't exist - I introduced it in clang 5.0). Fixing this issue with 5.0 removed more than 860 failures.
Also, for the same versions, a Qt compiler detection is considering that Clang is not a C++11 compiler because clang++, by default, defines __cplusplus as 199711L (-std=c++11 has to be added to define a correct __cplusplus). See https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-62535 for more information. Some discussions happened on the upstream mailing list about changing the default C++ dialect.
For example, with 4.0, this is causing 132 errors. With 5.0, probably thanks to a new Qt version, roughly the same number of packages are failing but because gcc just triggers a warning with the "nodiscard" attribute being incorrectly used when clang triggers an error.
In parallel, ignoring the haskell build failures, the numbers sightly increased since last year even if the overall percentage decreased (new packages being uploaded in the archive).
| Version | Build failures | Ignoring haskell pkgs |
| 3.8 | | 1367 / 5.6% |
| 3.9 | 2274 / 8.1% | 1618 / 5.8% |
| 4.0 | 2311 / 8.3% | 1655 / 5.9% |
| 5.0 | | 1445 / 5.1% |
In parallel, new warnings and errors showed up in Clang.
This is causing a new set of build failures (especially with the usage of -Werror).
As few examples:
* Starting with 4.0, clang triggers an error ordered comparison between pointer and zero ('char *' and 'int').
* Similarly, with this version, -Wmain introduces a new warning which will trigger a warning when a bool literal is returned from main.
* clang also introduced a new warning called -Waddress-of-packed-member causing 5 new errors.
* With the same version, clang can trigger a new error when auto is used in function return type.
Now, as a conclusion, having Debian being built with clang by default is still a long shot.
First, when Clang became usable for a general audience, gcc was lagging in term of warning and error detections. Now, gcc is in a much better position than it was, decreasing the interest to have clang replacing gcc. In parallel, most of the efforts in term of warnings
and mistake detections are currently done under the clang tidy umbrella, making them less intrusive as part of this initiative (but harder to use and to deploy).
As an example, the gcc warning -Wmisleading-indentation has been implemented under a clang-tidy checker.
Second, the very permissive license of clang has been a key factor for some operating systems to switch like the PS4, Mac OS X or FreeBSD. With Debian, the community is generally happy with the GPL.
Third, the performances are similar enough that it is not worth the work, except for some projects with very special needs.
Last, despite that it is much easier to contribute to llvm/clang than gcc (not copyright assignment or actual review system for example), this isn't a big differentiator for most of the projects.
Of course, I will continue to run and analysis these rebuilds as this is a great source of information for clang upstream developers to improve the compatibility with gcc and understand some impacts. However, until there is a big game changer, I will stop pursuing the goal of having Debian switching to clang instead of gcc. I will stop effort on the debile project (which was aiming to rebuild in the background packages).
