Google Now Uses Clang As Their Production Compiler For Chrome Linux Builds

For just over one month Google's Chrome/Chromium team has been using Clang as their production compiler on Linux in place of GCC.

Google is now using LLVM's Clang compiler to build Chrome production releases that began with the Chrome 38 release. Clang is being used as the default host compiler for Chrome/Android builds and replaces their use of GCC 4.6 in this position previously.

Google has been using Clang for production builds on OS X for a while now but this is a recent change for Linux/Android. There's not yet any communication about using Clang for Windows when the Clang Windows support improves. Previously though Google engineers have internally used Clang for pre-production builds due to Clang's faster compilation times and better diagnostics than GCC.

With the switch to Clang, the performance is found to be roughly the same as the GCC-built version while the binary size is about 8% smaller with the Clang build. Nico Weber of the Chromium team shared these details with Clang developers.

Earlier this month are my freshest GCC vs. Clang benchmark results with LLVM Clang vs. GCC On Fedora 21 With A High-End Xeon and GCC 5 Is Compiling Faster, But Still Falls Short Of Clang.