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Chrome On Windows Ditches Microsoft's Compiler, Now Uses Clang (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the natively-supported dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Chrome browser is now built using the Clang compiler on Windows. Previously built using the Microsoft C++ compiler, Google is now using the same compiler for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, and the switch makes Chrome arguably the first major software project to use Clang on Windows. Chrome on macOS and Linux has long been built using the Clang compiler and the LLVM toolchain. The open-source compiler is the compiler of choice on macOS, making it the natural option there, and it's also a first-class choice for Linux; though the venerable GCC is still the primary compiler choice on Linux, by using Clang instead, Google ensured that it has only one set of compiler quirks and oddities to work with rather than two. But Chrome on Windows has instead used Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler. The Visual C++ compiler is the best-supported, most widely used compiler on Windows and, critically, is the compiler with the best support for Windows' wide range of debugging and diagnostic tools. The Visual Studio debugger is widely loved by the C++ community, and other tools, such as the WinDbg debugger (often used for analyzing crash dumps), are core parts of the Windows developer experience.

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. LLVM Project Blog says by TimSSG · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/c...

    I read LLVM Project Blog; I think it said it was done partly for code maintenance issues. As, in it should be faster to add patches for Windows using the same Compiler over all platforms.

    Note: They are still using Microsoft linker.

    Tim S.

  2. Vivaldi by ledow · · Score: 3, Informative

    Er... Vivaldi has used Chrome as a base and been compiled with clang for a while now, I think:

    Vivaldi 1.14.1077.55 (Stable channel) (32-bit)
    Revision 46ff8f974f033190bbae67a70c7809ee15bc2353-
    OS Windows
    JavaScript V8 6.4.388.46
    Flash (Disabled)
    User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.189 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.95.1077.55
    Command Line "C:\Users\ldowling\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe" --always-authorize-plugins --enable-blink-features=ResizeObserver --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end https://vivaldi.com/newfeature...
    Executable Path C:\Users\ldowling\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe
    Profile Path C:\Users\ldowling\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data\Default
    Compiler clang