LLVM 7.1 Is Being Released Soon Due To A Bug Breaking ABI Compatibility With GCC

While LLVM 8.0 was released last month, LLVM 7.1 is set to come soon as an unusual update for this open-source compiler.

LLVM 7.0.1 was released back in December with mostly the same changes as the soon-to-be-released LLVM 7.1.0, which by the modern LLVM versioning scheme is quite unusual and they don't usually hit x.1.z versions under their Chrome-like versioning, but an ABI breakage happened.

Due to this nasty bug breaking ABI compatibility with the GCC compiler is why this special LLVM 7.1.0 release is coming about. Developers didn't want to introduce the fix back in the LLVM 7.0.1 release due to breaking the ABI in turn from LLVM 7.0.0, thus LLVM 7.1.0, which has taken months to materialize after the initial call for testing.

LLVM point release manager Tom Stellard of Red Hat announced on Thursday that LLVM 7.1.0-final has now been tagged in their source tree. Thus the final release preparations are underway for those wanting a corrected LLVM7 that restores ABI compatibility with GCC but not yet prepared to move to the current LLVM 8.0.