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Rust tutorial: Get started with the Rust language. Rust language gets direct WebAssembly compilation. Currently reading. The power behind Swift, Rust, Clang, and more. To get a true sense of what it is all about, see the Features section, which breaks each of these down and explains them in more detail.
Development of the new front-end was started out of a need for a compiler that allows better diagnostics, better integration with IDEs, a license that is compatible with commercial products, and a nimble compiler that is easy to develop and maintain.
All of these were motivations for starting work on a new front-end that could meet these needs. As example, Clang is used in production to build performance-critical software like Chrome or Firefox. If you are looking for source analysis or source-to-source transformation tools, Clang is probably a great solution for you.
GCC's PCH mechanism which is just a dump of the compiler memory image is related, but is architecturally only able to read the dump back into the exact same executable as the one that produced it it is not a structured format. Clang is much faster and uses far less memory than GCC. Clang aims to provide extremely clear and concise diagnostics error and warning messages , and includes support for expressive diagnostics.
GCC's warnings are sometimes acceptable, but are often confusing and it does not support expressive diagnostics. Clang also preserves typedefs in diagnostics consistently, showing macro expansions and many other features. Clang inherits a number of features from its use of LLVM as a backend, including support for a bytecode representation for intermediate code, pluggable optimizers, link-time optimization support, Just-In-Time compilation, ability to link in multiple code generators, etc.
Elsa's parser and AST is designed to be easily extensible by adding grammar rules. Pro's of clang vs Elsa: The Elsa community is extremely small and major development work seems to have ceased in , though it continues to be used by other small projects e. Clang has a vibrant community including developers that are paid to work on it full time. In practice this means that you can file bugs against Clang and they will often be fixed for you.
If you use Elsa, you are mostly on your own for bug fixes and feature enhancements. Elsa is not built as a stack of reusable libraries like clang is. It is very difficult to use part of Elsa without the whole front-end. You can do this in Clang and it is much faster than building an AST. Elsa does not have an integrated preprocessor, which makes it extremely difficult to accurately map from a source location in the AST back to its original position before preprocessing.
Like GCC, it does not keep track of macro expansions. Elsa is even slower and uses more memory than GCC, which itself requires far more space and time than clang.
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