LLVM 16.0 Feature Development Ends - Aiming For Early March Compiler Release

LLVM 16 feature development is now officially over with the code having been branched, LLVM 17.0 development now happening with the mainline code, and LLVM 16.0 stable hoping to officially release in early March.

Overnight LLVM 16.0 has been branched with this code now moving onto the bug-fixing phase. The LLVM 16.0-rc1 release is expected later this week with at least two release candidates expected during the month of February. Currently the LLVM developers are hoping to release LLVM 16.0.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 16.0 on 7 March.

LLVM/Clang 16 is bringing many new features including initial AMD Zen 4 support (still missing the tuning), Intel Emerald Rapids support, Intel Meteor Lake support, Intel Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge support, an Xtensa architecture back-end, JIT support for OpenMP offloading, -Ofast and -ffast-math for Flang, -mcpu=native / -mtune=native for RISC-V, many new features implemented in libc++, Zstd compression for ELF / debug sections, LLVM is now built with C++17 by default, Arm Neoverse V2 support, the LoongArch back-end is no longer treated as experimental, and many other compiler improvements.

LLVM 16.0 is coming up and will have friendly competition against GCC 13 that is expected to be formally released in March or April.