LLVM 18.1-rc1 Released For Enabling New Intel CPU Features, More C23 & C++23

Following the recent branching of LLVM 18, LLVM 18.1-rc1 was released today as the first test candidate for this half-year update of this widely-used open-source compiler stack.

LLVM 18 stable is planning for release in early March and thus the release dance is now underway. This is also going to be the first release under LLVM's new versioning scheme similar to GCC and that is why it will be LLVM 18.1 rather than LLVM 18.0.

LLVM 18 is bringing early enablement around Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), initial support for AMD GFX12 / RDNA4 GPUs, support for new ARM AArch64 processors, auto vectorization and other new features for the LoongArch backend, new extension support on RISC-V, support for x86 AVX10.1-256 and AVX10.1-512, Intel Clearwater Forest and Panther Lake targeting support, Intel USR_MSR instruction support, LLDB debugger enhancements, and much more.

Clang 18 is bringing a number of C++ feature additions for not only C++23 but some early C++2c work, more C23 features are now implemented including honoring of the "-std=c23" option, ongoing OpenACC support work, diagnostic enhancements, support for AVX10.1, -march= targeting for Intel Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest, and many other changes.

Those interested in testing out the LLVM 18.1-rc1 compiler stack can find all the downloads via GitHub.