LLVM 12.0-RC1 Available For Testing This Latest Open-Source Compiler

Following the LLVM 12 code branching earlier this week, the first release candidate of the forthcoming LLVM 12.0 is now available for testing.

As noted in that earlier article, LLVM 12 is bringing many big ticket items like the x86-64 microarchitecture feature level support in conjunction with the GCC/GNU camp, Intel Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids support, initial AMD Zen 3 support, squaring away C++20 support, and improvements to Clangd and other LLVM toolchain components. LLVM 12 is shaping up to be another great half-year update to this open-source compiler toolchain that is widely used throughout the industry.

LLVM 12.0.0 should be out around the start of March but first up is this RC1 release available for testing and then a second release candidate before the end of February. If all goes well, only the two release candidates will be warranted and the release cycle won't get dragged out with extra RCs due to bugs.

Those wanting to help in testing LLVM 12.0-RC1 can find LLVM/Clang sources via GitHub. There are also the 12.0-RC1 tags for other sub-projects like the Flang Fortran compiler, Compiler-RT, libc++, LLD, LLDB, Polly, and OpenMP support.

We'll be cranking up our LLVM/Clang 12 benchmarks over the coming weeks.