Cross-compiling with clang

As a preface, I am not a compiler developer, so please take my questions with a grain of salt. But there doesn’t appear to be a clang-user mailing list, so I’m posting to -dev.

I’m extremely interested in clang, since it both attempts to be saner than what gcc has become, and doesn’t have the community forking licensing issues of GPLv2 and GPLv3. My recent projects have involved building cross-compilers for various targets, such as ARM, MIPS, PPC, sh4, et cetera.

My main question is, has any work been done on allowing clang to cross-compile various targets? I found the following bug: http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4127 which indicated that it was still a work in progress.

Also, I suppose this question may be better posed to the llvm list, but is there any documentation on how to use a gcc frontend and llvm backend to cross-compile?

Lastly, and this is more of a slight nitpick issue, since I managed to find the bug with the following mailing list post: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.devel/5893 I’d point out that the -arch feature currently only works on MacOSX. I wasted several hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong on my Linux installation until I found ths out.

Thanks!

Hi Mark,

This is an area that we are actively interested in involving, but no one is driving yet. Are you interested in helping out? I’m not too familiar with the issues and Daniel (who is most knowledgeable about the driver) is out on vacation for 2 weeks.

-Chris

Indeed, I am very interested in this area, because of the frustrating
feleling of using gcc about cross compiling. Even though I don't have
much time, but I can submit some idea about this field;)

Sorry for the late reply.

I'd be interested in helping in any capability I can.

I was mainly curious as to the current status of cross-compiling
aspect of clang, since I'm eager for it to supplant GPLv3ed gcc.

Thanks

Hi Mark,

Hi, Daniel

The current status is basically what you've observed. We would like it
to happen, but no one is currently actively working on it.

That's not true and you know it :slight_smile: