LLVM Clang Now Builds Even More Debian Packages

Going back two years has been an initiative to build the Debian package base with LLVM/Clang rather than GCC -- for much the same reasons as building the Linux kernel with Clang. Thanks to Google's Summer of Code, there's been more progress on building out Debian using the latest Clang compiler.

Sylvestre Ledru who has been working on this initiative since the beginning to decouple GCC from Debian for various reasons, wrote an end-of-summer update on using Clang for compiling the Debian archive. The short story is that now only 5.7% of packages don't build compaed to 9.5% previously -- or in other words, with the latest LLVM and Clang code, only about 1,261 packages fail compared to over two thousand previously.

The better build rate comes down to Sylvestre and the student developers sending in upstream fixes for a lot of different code-bases to improve the code quality and portability. Additionally, improvements were made to Clang for enhancing its GCC compatibility support so it better acts and responds like GCC for code-bases that can't be updated or would be too intensive.

More details on this Clang'ing Debian effort can be found via this blog post.