IBM Is Looking At Adding AIX Support To LLVM / Clang

While IBM has their own in-house XL C/C++ compiler for their AIX operating system and GCC is also supported there too, IBM engineers are looking at adding AIX support to LLVM/Clang.

As a move that's "about time", IBM engineers are looking at adding support for LLVM and the Clang C/C++ compiler to their AIX operating system. Besides having another C/C++ compiler option, having LLVM working on AIX will open more code to running on AIX given the growing number of open and closed-source systems leveraging the LLVM compiler stack.

In particular, IBM is looking at seeing LLVM/Clang work well for AIX when running on POWER hardware. Their tentative plan involves 32 and 64-bit mode on AIX 7.1/7.2 releases.

They intend to ultimately upstream their patches if the work is successful and are currently soliciting feedback from upstream developers on this new proposal. They need to add the XCOFF object file support but ultimately shouldn't be any insurmountable task considering IBM AIX is Unix-based and there is POWER architecture support already within LLVM.