LLVM Clang Now Has Support For Custom-Width Integers With _ExtInt

While the C language committing is still evaluating adding N-bit integer support to the programming language, LLVM's Clang compiler has already added its experimental _ExtInt() implementation.

Rather than relying upon the common 16/32/64-bit integer types, ExtInt allows for using custom-width integers depending upon the needs of a particular variable. Like the C language proposal, the Clang ExtInt support has been led by Intel. It's taken a long time but as of recently in LLVM Git the support is in place.

One of the big motivators for this custom-width integer type support is for more efficient handling on FPGAs when not needing full-width integer types while the benefits are less for traditional processors.

For those interested in LLVM Clang's experimental ExtInt support for custom N-bit integer support, see the LLVM.org blog for more details on the initial implementation.