C++17 Filesystem Support Lands In LLVM's Libc++ Library

This week support for the official C++17 "filesystem" feature landed within LLVM's libc++ standard library.

C++17 adds file-system abstractions based upon the Boost library's filesystem support. This functionality makes it easier for C++ programs to perform file/directory operations across platforms in a standard manner. The file-system technical specification continues to be available here for all of the details.

While there has been filesystem support within GCC's libstdc++ library, this week the support just landed into LLVM's alternative libc++ library. (Though previously there was "experimental/filesystem" support via libc++experimental.) Eric Fiselier confirmed the landing this week but noted that it's not yet considered ABI stable. Similar to libstdc++, the filesystem support is in its own separate library as libc++fs.

The support is available in libc++ as of this commit. This will be part of this fall's LLVM 7.0 release.

The libc++ C++ standard library is most commonly used on macOS and FreeBSD platforms but less commonly can be used on Linux systems too. Those that haven't checked out libc++ in a while can do so via libcxx.llvm.org.