Why Samsung's Open-Source Group Likes The LLVM Clang Compiler

Samsung is just one of many companies that has grown increasingly fond of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ front-end. Clang is in fact the default compiler for native applications on their Tizen platform, but they have a whole list of reasons why they like this compiler.

Tilmann Scheller of Samsung's Open-Source Group and Samsung Research UK presented last week at LinuxCon Europe 2015 in Dublin about boosting developer productivity with Clang. Samsung acknowledges there's many companies investing in Clang, many platforms using it by default (besides Tizen, also OS X, FreeBSD, OpenMandriva Lx, etc), LLVM IR is very useful and extensible, etc.

Specifically in regards to Clang, it has great diagnostics for developers, the static analyzer is great, and there's useful tools like clang-tidy / clang-modernize / clang-format. While there's been ports to GCC, LLVM/Clang also has various sanitizers like AddressSanitizer for memory error detection.

According to Samsung's ARM numbers with an Arndale Octa board, GCC is just about 2% faster than Clang. However, when it comes to compile-times, Clang is much faster than GCC.

Those wishing to read more about what this Samsung developer thinks of LLVM/Clang, see the PDF slides.