LLVM 3.9 Has Been Branched, LLVM 4.0 Will Be Up Next

Right on schedule the LLVM 3.9 code was branched today in preparation for its formal release next month.

LLVM 3.9 is another six-month feature update to the LLVM compiler stack. We'll have more on its features and performance in the weeks ahead, in addition to the LLVM Clang benchmarks we already do daily with it at LinuxBenchmarking.com.

The LLVM 3.9 Release Candidate 1 should ship soon while a second release candidate is expected in early August. If all goes well, LLVM 3.9.0 (along with Clang 3.9 and related LLVM sub-projects) will be formally released around 22 August.

Following LLVM 3.9 will be LLVM 4.0, which is how the LLVM developers tend to do their versioning after x.9 releases. However, a few weeks back there was some discussion whether to actually do the LLVM 4.0 release now, postpone it and do LLVM 3.10, or do LLVM 4.0 but do some significant changes/breakages. As with this commit, it's looking like they settled for going to LLVM 4.0 as the next release, which will be officially released in early 2017.