GNU Hurd Toolchain Support Added To LLVM Clang Compiler

While GNU Hurd is designed to go hand-in-hand with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is now upstream compiler toolchain support with the more liberally licensed LLVM Clang C/C++ compiler.

The GNU Hurd target was merged into the Clang compiler for Hurd toolchain support and handling of its triple. The 300+ lines of code adding support for this GNU platform into Clang was merged overnight in time for LLVM/Clang 8.0 due out early next year.

There has been work going back years on porting LLVM/Clang to GNU Hurd particularly on the LLVM side due to the immense array of open-source projects relying upon LLVM in varying capacities.

Hurd still has quite a ways to go in hardware support, but at least there is now a new compiler option should its users be willing to venture outside of the GNU land. Besides Clang often compiling C/C++ code faster and the compiler being more liberally licensed that is attractive to some organizations, the LLVM toolchain does offer various analyzers/tools/utilities built around its ecosystem that are often innovative and useful to developers.