Khronos Members Hope To Begin Landing OpenCL C++ Support In LLVM's Clang Compiler

While upstream Clang has support for OpenCL C 2.0, it doesn't currently have mainline support for OpenCL C++ but fortunately that soon should change.

Khronos Group members plan to soon begin work on contributing their OpenCL C++ changes to the upstream LLVM Clang compiler. This would allow mainline Clang -- presumably in time for Clang 7.0 -- to support OpenCL C++ on the front-end. They plan to begin this effort of getting the code cleaned up and reviewed beginning in April, with no LLVM developers having raised any objections yet to adding OpenCL C++ to this open-source C/C++ compiler front-end.

This would take Clang's OpenCL support up to the latest version 2.2 specification. OpenCL 2.2 is the version released last May that introduced the OpenCL C++ kernel language as a subset of C++14.

Proposed details can be found on the Clang mailing list.

Clang's OpenCL support could become quite compelling if/when the long talked about SPIR-V back-end for LLVM finally materializes in mainline LLVM. It looks like it eventually will and was still re-enforced when asking Khronos about it recently. With this latest work it would allow LLVM/Clang to go from OpenCL C/C++ to SPIR-V on a fully open and mainline compiler stack. But for now this code is housed off in various branches and not too developer/user friendly for quick and easy deployment.