LLVM Clang 10 Can Build Over 95% Of The Debian Package Archive

While the Debian archive continues to be built with the GCC compiler by default and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future, Debian developers do continue experimenting with building the Debian archive under LLVM's Clang.

The practice of building the Debian archive with LLVM Clang is of interest to some Debian developers/users and is also a practical test of code portability and seeing how much of Debian can be built with an alternative compiler.

With newly posted results, LLVM Clang 10.0-RC2 can rebuild 95.5% of the archive with failures on some 4.5% of the 31k+ packages. That 4.5% build failure rate is in line with recent Clang releases but lower than Clang 6 and older where that rate was 6% or higher.

Most of the Clang failures stem from a QMake issue in finding the default search paths from the compiler, missing symbols at link time, and unable to find some headers.

The current results of building the Debian archive with the near-final Clang 10 can be found at clang.debian.net.