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Clang

A C language family frontend for LLVM.

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Clang is a language front-end and tooling infrastructure for the C language family, covering C, C++, Objective-C/C++, OpenCL, and CUDA within the LLVM project. It addresses the need for a compiler that provides clearer diagnostics, tighter IDE integration, and a license compatible with commercial products. It ships both a GCC-compatible driver (clang) and an MSVC-compatible driver (clang-cl.exe), and is described as a production-quality compiler for targets supported by LLVM.

Clang is built on a modular, library-based architecture, with components including libbasic, libast, liblex, libparse, libsema, libcodegen, librewrite, and libanalysis. These libraries support clients such as refactoring, static analysis, code generation, and source-to-source transformation, and can be integrated with IDEs. The project emphasizes fast compilation, low memory use, expressive diagnostics, GCC and MSVC compatibility, and a unified parser for C, Objective-C, C++, and Objective-C++. It is distributed under the LLVM Apache 2 License, and the source can be obtained and built directly.

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