Google Summer of Code: C++ Modernizer Improvements

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) offers students stipends to participate in open source projects during the summer. This year, I was accepted to work on the Clang C++ Modernizer, a project formerly known as the C++11 Migrator, driven by a team at Intel. The goals of the tool are to modernize C++ code by using the new features of new C++ standards in order to improve maintainability, readability and compile time and runtime performance. The project was featured in the April blog post “Status of the C++11 Migrator” and has been evolving since, both in terms of architecture and features.

This article presents the improvements made to the tool in the last few months, which include my work from this summer for GSoC. For a complete overview of the tool and how to install it, please visit the documentation: http://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-modernize.html#getting-started. For a demonstration of the tool you can take a look at the Going Native 2013 talk given by Chandler Carruth: The Care and Feeding of C++'s Dragons. clang-modernize is featured starting at ~33min.

The clang-cl /fallback mode

There has been a lot of work lately towards bringing an LLVM toolchain to the Windows platform (see A path forward for an LLVM toolchain on Windows). One result of that work is a new driver mode for Clang: clang-cl. This mode makes Clang understand the same kind of command-line arguments as Visual Studio's compiler, cl.exe. For example, a typical command to compile a file into an executable with Clang might be "clang hello.cc -o hello", whereas with cl.exe, one would use "cl.exe hello.cc /Fehello". Now one can use the latter syntax with Clang by substituting "cl.exe" with "clang-cl". This makes it easy to use Clang for existing projects in Visual Studio.

For the most part, clang-cl accepts exactly the same arguments as cl.exe. However, it also accepts some Clang-specific options. One such option that was added recently is the /fallback flag. The purpose of this flag is to make it easy to use clang-cl even in projects where Clang cannot yet compile all of the code. This post gives an example of how /fallback can be used.