Microsoft Continues To Be Interested In The Clang Compiler

This year has been interesting watching Microsoft from the Linux/open-source world for several reasons, among them has been for their growing adoption of LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler.

We've seen Microsoft work on improving Clang for Windows and utilizes Clang in Visual Studio 2015 for targeting Linux and mobile builds, including iOS support. However, it doesn't appear that Microsoft's interest in Clang is letting up at all.

An MSDN blog post this morning is about rejuvenating Microsoft's C/C++ compiler and at the end it reads, "We will continue to invest in improving our compiler with a goal towards making it fully standards compliant. That said, we are also very interested in improving our support for Clang as well. In fact, there is a presentation at CppCon on using the Clang front-end with our code generator and optimizer."

Indeed on the CppCon schedule is a talk about tieing the Clang open-source front-end with Microsoft's optimizing back-ends. It does seem Microsoft is committed to this and they'll be making it available to the public at some point, "The talk will disclose the architecture of how we tied the CLANG open source front end with the Microsoft optimizing backends (several configurations are needed) and how far we are from providing a CTP for public consumption targeting 4 different architectures. Included in this section will be a disclosure of data on compile time, memory consumption, conformance and correctness."

This new Microsoft project is sort of like an upside-down DragonEgg -- the (now defunct) LLVM sub-project that is a GCC plug-in to use GCC's front-end but with LLVM's optimizers and code generators. Instead with the Microsoft way, they'd be using Clang as the front-end for handling all the latest C and C++ standards while then shoving it through Microsoft's proprietary compiler stack.