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

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.

Comments

How well optimized is CLANG vs Visual C++ Compiler

[jellomizer]

Being that Google Chrome is in a constant speed race with Edge and Firefox all trying to be the fastest full featured browser out there. These guys need every advantage they can get to inch out on the benchmarks to claim they are the fastest. The general rule of thumb is tools made to run on many platforms tend to run more slowly then tools made for a particular platform.

Is Google going to stop in the benchmark war? Is CLang optimized enough for windows platforms to allow time saved in compiler compatibility to be used in better speed algorithms. Is CLang objectively equal or better then Visual C++ (As Microsoft sometimes sacrifices performance, for legacy support that Chrome may not be worried about)

No, that's typical of commercial software.

[Anonymous Coward]

Commercial software is written for profit; the programmers don't do shit to improve it unless there's a paying customer.

In contrast, open-source programs are written largely by people who are trying to scratch their own itches, including performance itches.

Good luck re-programming Microsoft Edge when you're unhappy with its performance.

Re:How well optimized is CLANG vs Visual C++ Compi

[countach]

Just guessing here, but I doubt the compiler makes any difference to speed whatsoever. Why? Because modern javascript browsers are just-in-time compiling the javascript into native code. So the native code is 2 levels removed from the C++, and the code your compiler generated.

LLVM Project Blog says

[TimSSG]

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.

Re:Performance

[bluefoxlucid]

My computer has 16GB of memory and keeps killing Chrome for using most of it. Shrug.

illustrating the power of open source

[e**(i pi)-1]

Open source projects like Clang is what brings us forward. Especially in the long term. Open source has enabled and improved many commercial products. The current case that Microsoft uses it as part of their development illustrates this very well.

Vivaldi

[ledow]

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

Re:Vivaldi

[istartedi]

The option to use a 3rd party compiler for the release has always been there. The big news in TFA is that Microsoft helped them with the PDB format so that you could compile *and* debug with Clang.