LLVM's Codebase Will Likely Move To C++17 Next Year

While LLVM's Clang compiler already supports C++17, what this change is about is the LLVM code itself and for sub-projects like Clang can begin making use of C++17 code itself. This in turn ups the requirements for being able to compile the code-base.

As it stands now LLVM requires C++11 for being able to build the compiler stack, but at this week's LLVM Developers' Meeting in San Jose they discussed upping that requirement. While they could move to C++14, the unofficial consensus is they should just move directly to C++17. This enables LLVM developers to take advantage of all these modern C++ features.

This does raise the requirements for then being able to compile a C++17-ified LLVM to GCC 7, LLVM Clang 4 or MSVC 2017 Update 5.

The plan isn't set in stone, but the bumping of the requirement will likely happen around next March. This pushes it past the current LLVM 8.0 development cycle and would thus take affect for LLVM 9.0 that in turn would debut towards the end of summer 2019.

The developer meeting discussion has now carried over onto the mailing list while the upstream developers continue discussing the specifics of their plan.