LLVM / Clang 7.0 Branching Today, Releasing In September

Not only is Mesa 18.2 ending feature development today to begin their release candidates, but LLVM 7.0 and its sub-projects like Clang 7.0 also happens to have aligned with a similar release schedule.

LLVM 7.0 and its sub-projects were just branched in Git/SVN and preparations have begun for pushing out the first release candidate. At least a second release candidate will follow later in August before they are planning to officially release LLVM 7.0.0 on or around 5 September.

Among the many additions and improvements to the LLVM 7.0 compiler stack over the past half-year include many improvements to the AMDGPU back-end (including the new Vega 20 and its deep learning instructions and also 32-bit pointers is another big AMDGPU LLVM addition), speculative load hardening as a Spectre V1 feature, bits of OpenCL C++ / OpenCL 2.2, LLVM-MCA was merged as a machine code analyzer, and various other enhancements and additions. A more complete LLVM/Clang 7.0 feature overview will come when I've had more time to go back through all of the commits and past Phoronix articles.

Look for the LLVM 7.0 release in early September and of course there will be some fresh LLVM/Clang benchmarks coming up on Phoronix.

Developing now on master in LLVM 8.0 that should then debut as stable around March of 2019.