Microsoft Wired Up Clang's Parser To Their Own Code Generator

Microsoft announced that they've developed support in Microsoft Visual Studio for making use of LLVM's Clang parser but to then use the optimizers and code generators from Microsoft Visual C++ rather than LLVM.

It's a similar but reverse concept to the previous LLVM DragonEgg project to replace GCC's optimizers and code generators with those from LLVM. Except in this Microsoft case, it's using Clang on the front and then tieing in Microsoft's mature optimizers and code generators.

With this route you can then use the Clang parser at least on your code-base across all platforms. This also allows for features not currently supported by Microsoft's Visual C++ to then be exposed: Microsoft's Dave Bartolomeo explained, "your code can take advantage of language features that are not currently available in the Visual C++ compiler, including C99 complex types and C++14 extended constexpr support. And because the Clang-based compiler generates the same debug information format as the Visual C++ compiler, you'll still be able to debug your code with the same great Visual Studio debugger experience."

Microsoft is looking at contributing back a majority of their LLVM / Clang changes back to the project.

More details via Microsoft's MSDN blog.