Major New Features¶

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Non-comprehensive list of changes in this release¶

• For the ARM target, C-language intrinsics are now provided for the full Arm v8.1-M MVE instruction set. <arm_mve.h> supports the complete API defined in the Arm C Language Extensions.
• For the ARM target, C-language intrinsics <arm_cde.h> for the CDE instruction set are now provided.
• clang adds support for a set of extended integer types (_ExtInt(N)) that permit non-power of 2 integers, exposing the LLVM integer types. Since a major motivating use case for these types is to limit ‘bit’ usage, these types don’t automatically promote to ‘int’ when operations are done between two ExtInt(N) types, instead math occurs at the size of the largest ExtInt(N) type.
• Users of UBSan, PGO, and coverage on Windows will now need to add clang’s library resource directory to their library search path. These features all use runtime libraries, and Clang provides these libraries in its resource directory. For example, if LLVM is installed in C:\Program Files\LLVM, then the profile runtime library will appear at C:\Program Files\LLVM\lib\clang\11.0.0\lib\windows\clang_rt.profile-x86_64.lib. To ensure that the linker can find the appropriate library, users should pass /LIBPATH:C:\Program Files\LLVM\lib\clang\11.0.0\lib\windows to the linker. If the user links the program with the clang or clang-cl drivers, the driver will pass this flag for them.
• Clang’s profile files generated through -fprofile-instr-generate are using a fixed hashing algorithm that prevents some collision when loading out-of-date profile informations. Clang can still read old profile files.

New Compiler Flags¶

• -fstack-clash-protection will provide a protection against the stack clash attack for x86 and s390x architectures through automatic probing of each page of allocated stack.
• -ffp-exception-behavior={ignore,maytrap,strict} allows the user to specify the floating-point exception behavior. The default setting is ignore.
• -ffp-model={precise,strict,fast} provides the user an umbrella option to simplify access to the many single purpose floating point options. The default setting is precise.
• The default module cache has moved from /tmp to a per-user cache directory. By default, this is ~/.cache but on some platforms or installations, this might be elsewhere. The -fmodules-cache-path=… flag continues to work.

Deprecated Compiler Flags¶

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

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Modified Compiler Flags¶

• -fno-common has been enabled as the default for all targets. Therefore, C code that uses tentative definitions as definitions of a variable in multiple translation units will trigger multiple-definition linker errors. Generally, this occurs when the use of the extern keyword is neglected in the declaration of a variable in a header file. In some cases, no specific translation unit provides a definition of the variable. The previous behavior can be restored by specifying -fcommon.
• -Wasm-ignored-qualifier (ex. asm const (“”)) has been removed and replaced with an error (this matches a recent change in GCC-9).
• -Wasm-file-asm-volatile (ex. asm volatile (“”) at global scope) has been removed and replaced with an error (this matches GCC’s behavior).
• Duplicate qualifiers on asm statements (ex. asm volatile volatile (“”)) no longer produces a warning via -Wduplicate-decl-specifier, but now an error (this matches GCC’s behavior).
• The deprecated argument -f[no-]sanitize-recover has changed to mean -f[no-]sanitize-recover=all instead of -f[no-]sanitize-recover=undefined,integer and is no longer deprecated.
• The argument to -f[no-]sanitize-trap=... is now optional and defaults to all.
• -fno-char8_t now disables the char8_t keyword, not just the use of char8_t as the character type of u8 literals. This restores the Clang 8 behavior that regressed in Clang 9 and 10.
• -print-targets has been added to print the registered targets.

New Pragmas in Clang¶

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Attribute Changes in Clang¶

• Attributes can now be specified by clang plugins. See the Clang Plugins documentation for details.

Windows Support¶

C Language Changes in Clang¶

• The default C language standard used when -std= is not specified has been upgraded from gnu11 to gnu17.
• Clang now supports the GNU C extension asm inline; it won’t do anything yet, but it will be parsed.
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C++ Language Changes in Clang¶

• Clang now implements a restriction on giving non-C-compatible anonymous structs a typedef name for linkage purposes, as described in C++ committee paper P1766R1 <http://wg21.link/p1766r1>. This paper was adopted by the C++ committee as a Defect Report resolution, so it is applied retroactively to all C++ standard versions. This affects code such as:

  typedef struct {
    int f() { return 0; }
  } S;
  

  Previous versions of Clang rejected some constructs of this form (specifically, where the linkage of the type happened to be computed before the parser reached the typedef name); those cases are still rejected in Clang 11. In addition, cases that previous versions of Clang did not reject now produce an extension warning. This warning can be disabled with the warning flag -Wno-non-c-typedef-for-linkage.

  Affected code should be updated to provide a tag name for the anonymous struct:

  struct S {
    int f() { return 0; }
  };
  

  If the code is shared with a C compilation (for example, if the parts that are not C-compatible are guarded with #ifdef __cplusplus), the typedef declaration should be retained, but a tag name should still be provided:

  typedef struct S {
    int f() { return 0; }
  } S;
  

Objective-C Language Changes in Clang¶

OpenCL C Language Changes in Clang¶

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ABI Changes in Clang¶

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 10.0.0 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.

Build System Changes¶

These are major changes to the build system that have happened since the 10.0.0 release of Clang. Users of the build system should adjust accordingly.

• clang-tidy and clang-include-fixer are no longer compiled into libclang by default. You can set LIBCLANG_INCLUDE_CLANG_TOOLS_EXTRA=ON to undo that, but it’s expected that that setting will go away eventually. If this is something you need, please reach out to the mailing list to discuss possible ways forward.

AST Matchers¶

• Traversal in AST Matchers was simplified to use the TK_IgnoreUnlessSpelledInSource mode by default, instead of TK_AsIs. This means that many uses of the ignoringImplicit() and similar matchers is no longer necessary. Clients of AST Matchers which wish to match on implicit AST nodes can wrap their matcher in traverse(TK_AsIs, ...) or use TraversalKindScope if appropriate. The clang-query tool also uses IgnoreUnlessSpelledInSource by default. The mode can be changed using set traversal AsIs in the clang-query environment.

  As this change requires downstream tools which use AST Matchers to adapt to the new default, a porting guide may be useful for downstream tools needing to adapt.

  Note that although there are many steps below, only the first is non-optional. The steps are intentionally extemely granular to facilitate understanding of the guide itself. It is reasonable to do some of the steps at the same time if you understand the guide:

  1. Use (your ASTContext instance).getParentMapContext().setTraversalKind(TK_AsIs) to restore the previous behavior for your tool. All further steps in this porting guide are optional.
  2. Wrap your existing matcher expressions with traverse(TK_AsIs, ...) before passing them to ASTMatchFinder::addMatcher.
  3. Remove (your ASTContext instance).getParentMapContext().setTraversalKind(TK_AsIs) from your tool so that the default behavior of your tool matches the default behavior of upstream clang. This is made possible by wrapping your matchers in traverse(TK_AsIs, ...) from step (2).
  4. Audit your matcher expressions and remove traverse(TK_AsIs, ...) where not needed.
  5. Audit your matcher expressions and remove calls to ignoring*() matchers where not needed.
  6. Audit your matcher expressions and consider whether the matcher is better using the TK_AsIs mode or if it can be better expressed in the default mode. For example, some matchers explicitly match has(implicitCastExpr(has(...))). Such matchers are sometimes written by author who were unaware of the existence of the ignoring*() matchers.

clang-format¶

• Option IndentExternBlock has been added to optionally apply indenting inside extern "C" and extern "C++" blocks.

• IndentExternBlock option accepts AfterExternBlock to use the old behavior, as well as Indent and NoIndent options, which map to true and false, respectively.

  Indent:                       NoIndent:
   #ifdef __cplusplus          #ifdef __cplusplus
   extern "C" {                extern "C++" {
   #endif                      #endif
  
        void f(void);          void f(void);
  
   #ifdef __cplusplus          #ifdef __cplusplus
   }                           }
   #endif                      #endif
  

• Option IndentCaseBlocks has been added to support treating the block following a switch case label as a scope block which gets indented itself. It helps avoid having the closing bracket align with the switch statement’s closing bracket (when IndentCaseLabels is false).

  switch (fool) {                vs.     switch (fool) {
  case 1:                                case 1: {
    {                                      bar();
       bar();                            } break;
    }                                    default: {
    break;                                 plop();
  default:                               }
    {                                    }
      plop();
    }
  }
  

• Option ObjCBreakBeforeNestedBlockParam has been added to optionally apply linebreaks for function arguments declarations before nested blocks.

• Option InsertTrailingCommas can be set to TCS_Wrapped to insert trailing commas in container literals (arrays and objects) that wrap across multiple lines. It is currently only available for JavaScript and disabled by default (TCS_None).

• Option BraceWrapping.BeforeLambdaBody has been added to manage lambda line break inside function parameter call in Allman style.

  true:
  connect(
    []()
    {
      foo();
      bar();
    });
  
  false:
  connect([]() {
      foo();
      bar();
    });
  

• Option AlignConsecutiveBitFields has been added to align bit field declarations across multiple adjacent lines

  true:
    bool aaa  : 1;
    bool a    : 1;
    bool bb   : 1;
  
  false:
    bool aaa : 1;
    bool a : 1;
    bool bb : 1;
  

• Option BraceWrapping.BeforeWhile has been added to allow wrapping before the `while in a do..while loop. By default the value is (false)

  In previous releases IndentBraces implied BraceWrapping.BeforeWhile. If using a Custom BraceWrapping style you may need to now set BraceWrapping.BeforeWhile to (true) to be explicit.

  true:
  do {
    foo();
  }
  while(1);
  
  false:
  do {
    foo();
  } while(1);
  

libclang¶

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Static Analyzer¶

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Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (UBSan)¶

Python Binding Changes¶

The following methods have been added:

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