Major New Features¶

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Non-comprehensive list of changes in this release¶

• In both C and C++ (C17 6.5.6p8, C++ [expr.add]), pointer arithmetic is only permitted within arrays. In particular, the behavior of a program is not defined if it adds a non-zero offset (or in C, any offset) to a null pointer, or if it forms a null pointer by subtracting an integer from a non-null pointer, and the LLVM optimizer now uses those guarantees for transformations. This may lead to unintended behavior in code that performs these operations. The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer -fsanitize=pointer-overflow check has been extended to detect these cases, so that code relying on them can be detected and fixed.

• For X86 target, -march=skylake-avx512, -march=icelake-client, -march=icelake-server, -march=cascadelake, -march=cooperlake will default to not using 512-bit zmm registers in vectorized code unless 512-bit intrinsics are used in the source code. 512-bit operations are known to cause the CPUs to run at a lower frequency which can impact performance. This behavior can be changed by passing -mprefer-vector-width=512 on the command line.

New Compiler Flags¶

• The -fgnuc-version= flag now controls the value of __GNUC__ and related macros. This flag does not enable or disable any GCC extensions implemented in Clang. Setting the version to zero causes Clang to leave __GNUC__ and other GNU-namespaced macros, such as __GXX_WEAK__, undefined.
• vzeroupper insertion on X86 targets can now be disabled with -mno-vzeroupper. You can also force vzeroupper insertion to be used on CPUs that normally wouldn’t with -mvzeroupper.

Deprecated Compiler Flags¶

The following options are deprecated and ignored. They will be removed in future versions of Clang.

• -mmpx used to enable the __MPX__ preprocessor define for the Intel MPX instructions. There were no MPX intrinsics.
• -mno-mpx used to disable -mmpx and is the default behavior.
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Modified Compiler Flags¶

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New Pragmas in Clang¶

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Attribute Changes in Clang¶

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Windows Support¶

• Previous Clang versions contained a work-around to avoid an issue with the standard library headers in Visual Studio 2019 versions prior to 16.3. This work-around has now been removed, and users of Visual Studio 2019 are encouraged to upgrade to 16.3 or later, otherwise they may see link errors as below:

  error LNK2005: "bool const std::_Is_integral<int>" (??$_Is_integral@H@std@@3_NB) already defined
  

C Language Changes in Clang¶

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C++ Language Changes in Clang¶

• The behaviour of the gnu_inline attribute now matches GCC, for cases where used without the extern keyword. As this is a change compared to how it behaved in previous Clang versions, a warning is emitted for this combination.

Objective-C Language Changes in Clang¶

• In both Objective-C and Objective-C++, -Wcompare-distinct-pointer-types will now warn when comparing ObjC Class with an ObjC instance type pointer.

  Class clz = ...;
  MyType *instance = ...;
  bool eq = (clz == instance); // Previously undiagnosed, now warns.
  

• Objective-C++ now diagnoses conversions between Class and ObjC instance type pointers. Such conversions already emitted an on-by-default -Wincompatible-pointer-types warning in Objective-C mode, but had inadvertently been missed entirely in Objective-C++. This has been fixed, and they are now diagnosed as errors, consistent with the usual C++ treatment for conversions between unrelated pointer types.

  Class clz = ...;
  MyType *instance = ...;
  clz = instance; // Previously undiagnosed, now an error.
  instance = clz; // Previously undiagnosed, now an error.
  

  One particular issue you may run into is attempting to use a class as a key in a dictionary literal. This will now result in an error, because Class is not convertable to id<NSCopying>. (Note that this was already a warning in Objective-C mode.) While an arbitrary Class object is not guaranteed to implement NSCopying, the default metaclass implementation does. Therefore, the recommended solution is to insert an explicit cast to id, which disables the type-checking here.

Class cls = ...;

// Error: cannot convert from Class to id<NSCoding>.
NSDictionary* d = @{cls : @"Hello"};

// Fix: add an explicit cast to 'id'.
NSDictionary* d = @{(id)cls : @"Hello"};

OpenCL C Language Changes in Clang¶

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ABI Changes in Clang¶

• gcc passes vectors of __int128 in memory on X86-64. Clang historically broke the vectors into multiple scalars using two 64-bit values for each element. Clang now matches the gcc behavior on Linux and NetBSD. You can switch back to old API behavior with flag: -fclang-abi-compat=9.0.

OpenMP Support in Clang¶

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CUDA Support in Clang¶

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Internal API Changes¶

These are major API changes that have happened since the 9.0.0 release of Clang. If upgrading an external codebase that uses Clang as a library, this section should help get you past the largest hurdles of upgrading.

• libTooling APIs that transfer ownership of FrontendAction objects now pass them by unique_ptr, making the ownership transfer obvious in the type system. FrontendActionFactory::create() now returns a unique_ptr<FrontendAction>. runToolOnCode, runToolOnCodeWithArgs, ToolInvocation::ToolInvocation() now take a unique_ptr<FrontendAction>.

Build System Changes¶

These are major changes to the build system that have happened since the 9.0.0 release of Clang. Users of the build system should adjust accordingly.

• In 8.0.0 and below, the install-clang-headers target would install clang’s resource directory headers. This installation is now performed by the install-clang-resource-headers target. Users of the old install-clang-headers target should switch to the new install-clang-resource-headers target. The install-clang-headers target now installs clang’s API headers (corresponding to its libraries), which is consistent with the install-llvm-headers target.
• In 9.0.0 and later Clang added a new target, clang-cpp, which generates a shared library comprised of all the clang component libraries and exporting the clang C++ APIs. Additionally the build system gained the new “CLANG_LINK_CLANG_DYLIB” option, which defaults Off, and when set to On, will force clang (and clang-based tools) to link the clang-cpp library instead of statically linking clang’s components. This option will reduce the size of binary distributions at the expense of compiler performance.
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AST Matchers¶

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clang-format¶

• The Standard style option specifies which version of C++ should be used when parsing and formatting C++ code. The set of allowed values has changed:

  • Latest will always enable new C++ language features.
  • c++03, c++11, c++14, c++17, c++20 will pin to exactly that language version.
  • Auto is the default and detects style from the code (this is unchanged).

  The previous values of Cpp03 and Cpp11 are deprecated. Note that Cpp11 is treated as Latest, as this was always clang-format’s behavior. (One motivation for this change is the new name describes the behavior better).

libclang¶

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Static Analyzer¶

• The Clang analyzer checker DeadStores gets a new option called WarnForDeadNestedAssignments to detect nested dead assignments (enabled by default).
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Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (UBSan)¶

• • The pointer-overflow check was extended added to catch the cases where a non-zero offset is applied to a null pointer, or the result of applying the offset is a null pointer.

    #include <cstdint> // for intptr_t
    
    static char *getelementpointer_inbounds(char *base, unsigned long offset) {
      // Potentially UB.
      return base + offset;
    }
    
    char *getelementpointer_unsafe(char *base, unsigned long offset) {
      // Always apply offset. UB if base is ``nullptr`` and ``offset`` is not
      // zero, or if ``base`` is non-``nullptr`` and ``offset`` is
      // ``-reinterpret_cast<intptr_t>(base)``.
      return getelementpointer_inbounds(base, offset);
    }
    
    char *getelementpointer_safe(char *base, unsigned long offset) {
      // Cast pointer to integer, perform usual arithmetic addition,
      // and cast to pointer. This is legal.
      char *computed =
          reinterpret_cast<char *>(reinterpret_cast<intptr_t>(base) + offset);
      // If either the pointer becomes non-``nullptr``, or becomes
      // ``nullptr``, we must use ``computed`` result.
      if (((base == nullptr) && (computed != nullptr)) ||
          ((base != nullptr) && (computed == nullptr)))
        return computed;
      // Else we can use ``getelementpointer_inbounds()``.
      return getelementpointer_inbounds(base, offset);
    }
    

Python Binding Changes¶

The following methods have been added:

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