Clang 15.0.7 Release Notes

Written by the LLVM Team

Introduction

This document contains the release notes for the Clang C/C++/Objective-C frontend, part of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, release 15.0.7. Here we describe the status of Clang in some detail, including major improvements from the previous release and new feature work. For the general LLVM release notes, see the LLVM documentation. All LLVM releases may be downloaded from the LLVM releases web site.

For more information about Clang or LLVM, including information about the latest release, please see the Clang Web Site or the LLVM Web Site.

Note that if you are reading this file from a Git checkout or the main Clang web page, this document applies to the next release, not the current one. To see the release notes for a specific release, please see the releases page.

What’s New in Clang 15.0.7?

Some of the major new features and improvements to Clang are listed here. Generic improvements to Clang as a whole or to its underlying infrastructure are described first, followed by language-specific sections with improvements to Clang’s support for those languages.

Potentially Breaking Changes

These changes are ones which we think may surprise users when upgrading to Clang 15.0.7 because of the opportunity they pose for disruption to existing code bases.

  • The -Wimplicit-function-declaration and -Wimplicit-int warning diagnostics are now enabled by default in C99, C11, and C17. As of C2x, support for implicit function declarations and implicit int has been removed, and the warning options will have no effect. Specifying -Wimplicit-int in C89 mode will now issue warnings instead of being a noop. NOTE these warnings are expected to default to an error in Clang 16. We recommend that projects using configure scripts verify the results do not change before/after setting -Werror=implicit-function-declarations or -Wimplicit-int to avoid incompatibility with Clang 16.

Major New Features

  • Clang now supports the -fzero-call-used-regs feature for x86. The purpose of this feature is to limit Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) exploits and information leakage. It works by zeroing out a selected class of registers before function return — e.g., all GPRs that are used within the function. There is an analogous zero_call_used_regs attribute to allow for finer control of this feature.

  • Clang now supports randomizing structure layout in C. This feature is a compile-time hardening technique, making it more difficult for an attacker to retrieve data from structures. Specify randomization with the randomize_layout attribute. The corresponding no_randomize_layout attribute can be used to turn the feature off.

    A seed value is required to enable randomization, and is deterministic based on a seed value. Use the -frandomize-layout-seed= or -frandomize-layout-seed-file= flags.

    Note

    Randomizing structure layout is a C-only feature.

  • Clang now supports the -fstrict-flex-arrays=<arg> option to control which array bounds lead to flexible array members. The option yields more accurate __builtin_object_size and __builtin_dynamic_object_size results in most cases but may be overly conservative for some legacy code.

  • Experimental support for HLSL has been added. The implementation is incomplete and highly experimental. For more information about the ongoing work to support HLSL see the documentation, or the GitHub project.

Bug Fixes

  • CXXNewExpr::getArraySize() previously returned a llvm::Optional wrapping a nullptr when the CXXNewExpr did not have an array size expression. This was fixed and ::getArraySize() will now always either return None or a llvm::Optional wrapping a valid Expr*. This fixes Issue 53742.

  • We now ignore full expressions when traversing cast subexpressions. This fixes Issue 53044.

  • Allow -Wno-gnu to silence GNU extension diagnostics for pointer arithmetic diagnostics. Fixes Issue 54444.

  • Placeholder constraints, as in Concept auto x = f();, were not checked when modifiers like auto& or auto** were added. These constraints are now checked. This fixes Issue 53911 and Issue 54443.

  • Previously invalid member variables with template parameters would crash clang. Now fixed by setting identifiers for them. This fixes Issue 28475 (PR28101).

  • Now allow the restrict and _Atomic qualifiers to be used in conjunction with __auto_type to match the behavior in GCC. This fixes Issue 53652.

  • No longer crash when specifying a variably-modified parameter type in a function with the naked attribute. This fixes Issue 50541.

  • Allow multiple #pragma weak directives to name the same undeclared (if an alias, target) identifier instead of only processing one such #pragma weak per identifier. Fixes Issue 28985.

  • Assignment expressions in C11 and later mode now properly strip the _Atomic qualifier when determining the type of the assignment expression. Fixes Issue 48742.

  • Improved the diagnostic when accessing a member of an atomic structure or union object in C; was previously an unhelpful error, but now issues a -Watomic-access warning which defaults to an error. Fixes Issue 54563.

  • Unevaluated lambdas in dependant contexts no longer result in clang crashing. This fixes Issues 50376, 51414, 51416, and 51641.

  • The builtin function __builtin_dump_struct would crash clang when the target struct contains a bitfield. It now correctly handles bitfields. This fixes Issue Issue 54462.

  • Statement expressions are now disabled in default arguments in general. This fixes Issue Issue 53488.

  • According to CWG 1394 and C++20 [dcl.fct.def.general]p2, Clang should not diagnose incomplete types in function definitions if the function body is = delete;. This fixes Issue Issue 52802.

  • Unknown type attributes with a [[]] spelling are no longer diagnosed twice. This fixes Issue Issue 54817.

  • Clang should no longer incorrectly diagnose a variable declaration inside of a lambda expression that shares the name of a variable in a containing if/while/for/switch init statement as a redeclaration. This fixes Issue 54913.

  • Overload resolution for constrained function templates could use the partial order of constraints to select an overload, even if the parameter types of the functions were different. It now diagnoses this case correctly as an ambiguous call and an error. Fixes Issue 53640.

  • No longer crash when trying to determine whether the controlling expression argument to a generic selection expression has side effects in the case where the expression is result dependent. This fixes Issue 50227.

  • Fixed an assertion when constant evaluating an initializer for a GCC/Clang floating-point vector type when the width of the initialization is exactly the same as the elements of the vector being initialized. Fixes Issue 50216.

  • Fixed a crash when the __bf16 type is used such that its size or alignment is calculated on a target which does not support that type. This fixes Issue 50171.

  • Fixed a false positive diagnostic about an unevaluated expression having no side effects when the expression is of VLA type and is an operand of the sizeof operator. Fixes Issue 48010.

  • Fixed a false positive diagnostic about scoped enumerations being a C++11 extension in C mode. A scoped enumeration’s enumerators cannot be named in C because there is no way to fully qualify the enumerator name, so this “extension” was unintentional and useless. This fixes Issue 42372.

  • Clang will now find and emit a call to an allocation function in a promise_type body for coroutines if there is any allocation function declaration in the scope of promise_type. Additionally, to implement CWG2585, a coroutine will no longer generate a call to a global allocation function with the signature (std::size_t, p0, ..., pn). This fixes Issue Issue 54881.

  • Implement CWG 2394: Const class members may be initialized with a defaulted default constructor under the same conditions it would be allowed for a const object elsewhere.

  • __has_unique_object_representations no longer reports that _BitInt types have unique object representations if they have padding bits.

  • Unscoped and scoped enumeration types can no longer be initialized from a brace-init-list containing a single element of a different scoped enumeration type.

  • Allow use of an elaborated type specifier as a _Generic selection association in C++ mode. This fixes Issue 55562.

  • Clang will allow calling a consteval function in a default argument. This fixes Issue 48230.

  • Fixed memory leak due to VarTemplateSpecializationDecl using TemplateArgumentListInfo instead of ASTTemplateArgumentListInfo.

  • An initializer for a static variable declaration, which is nested inside a statement expression in an aggregate initializer, is now emitted as a dynamic initializer. Previously the variable would incorrectly be zero-initialized. In contexts where a dynamic initializer is not allowed this is now diagnosed as an error.

  • Clang now correctly emits symbols for implicitly instantiated constexpr template function. Fixes Issue 55560.

  • Clang now checks ODR violations when merging concepts from different modules. Note that this may possibly break existing code, and is done so intentionally. Fixes Issue 56310.

  • Clang will now look through type sugar when checking a member function is a move assignment operator. Fixes Issue 56456.

  • Fixed a crash when a variable with a bool enum type that has no definition used in comparison operators. Fixes Issue 56560.

  • Fix that if consteval could evaluate to true at runtime because it was incorrectly constant folded. Fixes Issue 55638.

  • Fixed incompatibility of Clang’s <stdatomic.h> with MSVC <atomic>. Fixes MSVC STL Issue 2862.

  • Empty enums and enums with a single enumerator with value zero will be considered to have one positive bit in order to represent the underlying value. This effects whether we consider the store of the value one to be well defined.

  • An operator introduced to the scope via a using statement now correctly references this statement in clangd (hover over the symbol, jump to definition) as well as in the AST dump. This also fixes issue 55095 as a side-effect.

  • When including a PCH from a GCC style directory with multiple alternative PCH files, Clang now requires all defines set on the command line while generating the PCH and when including it to match. This matches GCC’s behaviour. Previously Clang would tolerate defines to be set when creating the PCH but missing when used, or vice versa. This makes sure that Clang picks the correct one, where it previously would consider multiple ones as potentially acceptable (and erroneously use whichever one is tried first).

  • Fix a crash when generating code coverage information for an if consteval statement. This fixes Issue 57377.

  • Fix a crash when a btf_type_tag attribute is applied to the pointee of a function pointer.

  • Clang 14 predeclared some builtin POSIX library functions in gnu2x mode, and Clang 15 accidentally stopped predeclaring those functions in that language mode. Clang 16 now predeclares those functions again. This fixes Issue 56607.

Improvements to Clang’s diagnostics

  • -Wliteral-range will warn on floating-point equality comparisons with constants that are not representable in a casted value. For example, (float) f == 0.1 is always false.

  • -Winline-namespace-reopened-noninline now takes into account that the inline keyword must appear on the original but not necessarily all extension definitions of an inline namespace and therefore points its note at the original definition. This fixes Issue 50794 (PR51452).

  • -Wunused-but-set-variable now also warns if the variable is only used by unary operators.

  • -Wunused-variable no longer warn for references extending the lifetime of temporaries with side effects. This fixes Issue 54489.

  • Modified the behavior of -Wstrict-prototypes and added a new, related diagnostic -Wdeprecated-non-prototype. The strict prototypes warning will now only diagnose deprecated declarations and definitions of functions without a prototype where the behavior in C2x will remain correct. This diagnostic remains off by default but is now enabled via -pedantic due to it being a deprecation warning. -Wstrict-prototypes has no effect in C2x or when -fno-knr-functions is enabled. -Wdeprecated-non-prototype will diagnose cases where the deprecated declarations or definitions of a function without a prototype will change behavior in C2x. Additionally, it will diagnose calls which pass arguments to a function without a prototype. This warning is enabled only when the -Wdeprecated-non-prototype option is enabled at the function declaration site, which allows a developer to disable the diagnostic for all callers at the point of declaration. This diagnostic is grouped under the -Wstrict-prototypes warning group, but is enabled by default. -Wdeprecated-non-prototype has no effect in C2x or when -fno-knr-functions is enabled.

  • Clang now appropriately issues an error in C when a definition of a function without a prototype and with no arguments is an invalid redeclaration of a function with a prototype. e.g., void f(int); void f() {} is now properly diagnosed.

  • No longer issue a “declaration specifiers missing, defaulting to int” diagnostic in C89 mode because it is not an extension in C89, it was valid code. The diagnostic has been removed entirely as it did not have a diagnostic group to disable it, but it can be covered wholly by -Wimplicit-int.

  • -Wmisexpect warns when the branch weights collected during profiling conflict with those added by llvm.expect.

  • -Wthread-safety-analysis now considers overloaded compound assignment and increment/decrement operators as writing to their first argument, thus requiring an exclusive lock if the argument is guarded.

  • -Wenum-conversion now warns on converting a signed enum of one type to an unsigned enum of a different type (or vice versa) rather than -Wsign-conversion.

  • Added the -Wunreachable-code-generic-assoc diagnostic flag (grouped under the -Wunreachable-code flag) which is enabled by default and warns the user about _Generic selection associations which are unreachable because the type specified is an array type or a qualified type.

  • Added the -Wgnu-line-marker diagnostic flag (grouped under the -Wgnu flag) which is a portability warning about use of GNU linemarker preprocessor directives. Fixes Issue 55067.

  • Using #warning, #elifdef and #elifndef that are incompatible with C/C++ standards before C2x/C++2b are now warned via -pedantic. Additionally, on such language mode, -Wpre-c2x-compat and -Wpre-c++2b-compat diagnostic flags report a compatibility issue. Fixes Issue 55306.

  • Clang now checks for stack resource exhaustion when recursively parsing declarators in order to give a diagnostic before we run out of stack space. This fixes Issue 51642.

  • Unknown preprocessor directives in a skipped conditional block are now given a typo correction suggestion if the given directive is sufficiently similar to another preprocessor conditional directive. For example, if #esle appears in a skipped block, we will warn about the unknown directive and suggest #else as an alternative. #elifdef and #elifndef are only suggested when in C2x or C++2b mode. Fixes Issue 51598.

  • The -Wdeprecated diagnostic will now warn on out-of-line constexpr declarations downgraded to definitions in C++1z, in addition to the existing warning on out-of-line const declarations.

  • -Wshift-overflow will not warn for signed left shifts in C++20 mode (and newer), as it will always wrap and never overflow. This fixes Issue 52873.

  • When using class templates without arguments, clang now tells developers that template arguments are missing in certain contexts. This fixes Issue 55962.

  • Printable Unicode characters within static_assert messages are no longer escaped.

  • The -Winfinite-recursion diagnostic no longer warns about unevaluated operands of a typeid expression, as they are now modeled correctly in the CFG. This fixes Issue 21668.

  • -Wself-assign, -Wself-assign-overloaded and -Wself-move will suggest a fix if the decl being assigned is a parameter that shadows a data member of the contained class.

  • Added -Winvalid-utf8 which diagnoses invalid UTF-8 code unit sequences in comments.

  • The -Wint-conversion warning diagnostic for implicit int <-> pointer conversions now defaults to an error in all C language modes. It may be downgraded to a warning with -Wno-error=int-conversion, or disabled entirely with -Wno-int-conversion.

  • Deprecated lax vector conversions for Altivec vectors. The default behaviour with respect to these conversions will switch to disable them in an upcoming release.

  • On AIX, only emit XL compatibility warning when 16 byte aligned structs are pass-by-value function arguments.

Non-comprehensive list of changes in this release

  • Improve __builtin_dump_struct:

    • Support bitfields in struct and union.

    • Improve the dump format, dump both bitwidth (if its a bitfield) and field value.

    • Remove anonymous tag locations and flatten anonymous struct members.

    • Beautify dump format, add indent for struct members.

    • Support passing additional arguments to the formatting function, allowing use with fprintf and similar formatting functions.

    • Support use within constant evaluation in C++, if a constexpr formatting function is provided.

    • Support formatting of base classes in C++.

    • Support calling a formatting function template in C++, which can provide custom formatting for non-aggregate types.

  • Previously disabled sanitizer options now enabled by default:

    • ASAN_OPTIONS=detect_stack_use_after_return=1 (only on Linux).

    • MSAN_OPTIONS=poison_in_dtor=1.

  • Some type-trait builtins, such as __has_trivial_assign, have been documented as deprecated for a while because their semantics don’t mix well with post-C++11 type-traits. Clang now emits deprecation warnings for them under the flag -Wdeprecated-builtins.

New Compiler Flags

  • Added the -fno-knr-functions flag to allow users to opt into the C2x behavior where a function with an empty parameter list is treated as though the parameter list were void. There is no -fknr-functions or -fno-no-knr-functions flag; this feature cannot be disabled in language modes where it is required, such as C++ or C2x.

  • A new ARM pass to workaround Cortex-A57 Erratum 1742098 and Cortex-A72 Erratum 1655431 can be enabled using -mfix-cortex-a57-aes-1742098 or -mfix-cortex-a72-aes-1655431. The pass is enabled when using either of these cpus with -mcpu= and can be disabled using -mno-fix-cortex-a57-aes-1742098 or -mno-fix-cortex-a72-aes-1655431.

  • Added the -fexperimental-max-bitint-width= option to increase the maximum allowed bit width of _BitInt types beyond the default of 128 bits. Some operations, such as division or float-to-integer conversion, on _BitInt types with more than 128 bits currently crash clang. This option will be removed in the future once clang supports all such operations.

  • Added the -print-diagnostic-options option, which prints a list of warnings the compiler supports.

  • Added the -Warray-parameter warning. It diagnoses differences between array parameters between function redeclarations (arrays of different extents, etc). This flag is related to the same flag in GCC, but is different in that it does not accept an explicitly- specified warning level and use of this flag has no effect on -Warray-bounds.

Deprecated Compiler Flags

Modified Compiler Flags

Removed Compiler Flags

  • Removed the -fno-concept-satisfaction-caching flag. The flag was added at the time when the draft of C++20 standard did not permit caching of atomic constraints. The final standard permits such caching, see WG21 P2104R0.

New Pragmas in Clang

  • Added support for MSVC’s #pragma function, which tells the compiler to generate calls to functions listed in the pragma instead of using the builtins.

  • Added support for MSVC’s #pragma alloc_text. The pragma names the code section functions are placed in. The pragma only applies to functions with C linkage.

  • Added support for an empty optimization list for MSVC’s #pragma optimize. The pragma takes a list of optimizations to turn on or off which applies to all functions following the pragma. At the moment, only an empty list is supported.

  • …

Attribute Changes in Clang

  • Added support for parameter pack expansion in clang::annotate.

  • The overloadable attribute can now be written in all of the syntactic locations a declaration attribute may appear. This fixes Issue 53805.

  • Improved namespace attributes handling:

    • Handle GNU attributes before a namespace identifier and subsequent attributes of different kinds.

    • Emit error on GNU attributes for a nested namespace definition.

  • Statement attributes [[clang::noinline]] and [[clang::always_inline]] can be used to control inlining decisions at callsites.

  • #pragma clang attribute push now supports multiple attributes within a single directive.

  • The __declspec(naked) attribute can no longer be written on a member function in Microsoft compatibility mode, matching the behavior of cl.exe.

  • Attribute no_builtin should now affect the generated code. It now disables builtins (corresponding to the specific names listed in the attribute) in the body of the function the attribute is on.

  • When the weak attribute is applied to a const qualified variable clang no longer tells the backend it is allowed to optimize based on initializer value.

  • Added the clang::annotate_type attribute, which can be used to add annotations to types (see documentation for details).

  • Added half float to types that can be represented by __attribute__((mode(XX))).

  • The format attribute can now be applied to non-variadic functions. The format string must correctly format the fixed parameter types of the function. Using the attribute this way emits a GCC compatibility diagnostic.

  • Support was added for __attribute__((function_return("thunk-extern"))) to X86 to replace ret instructions with jmp __x86_return_thunk. The corresponding attribute to disable this, __attribute__((function_return("keep"))) was added. This is intended to be used by the Linux kernel to mitigate RETBLEED.

  • Ignore the __preferred_name__ attribute when writing for C++20 module interfaces. This is a short-term workaround intentionally since clang doesn’t take care of the serialization and deserialization of __preferred_name__. See https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/56490 for example.

Windows Support

  • Add support for MSVC-compatible /JMC//JMC- flag in clang-cl (supports X86/X64/ARM/ARM64). /JMC could only be used when /Zi or /Z7 is turned on. With this addition, clang-cl can be used in Visual Studio for the JustMyCode feature. Note, you may need to manually add /JMC as additional compile options in the Visual Studio since it currently assumes clang-cl does not support /JMC.

  • Implemented generation of SEH unwind information on ARM. (C++ exception handling in MSVC mode is still unimplemented though.)

  • Switched MinGW mode on ARM to use SEH instead of DWARF for unwind information.

AIX Support

  • The driver no longer adds -mignore-xcoff-visibility by default for AIX targets when no other visibility command-line options are in effect, as ignoring hidden visibility can silently have undesirable side effects (e.g when libraries depend on visibility to hide non-ABI facing entities). The -mignore-xcoff-visibility option can be manually specified on the command-line to recover the previous behavior if desired.

C Language Changes in Clang

C2x Feature Support

C++ Language Changes in Clang

  • Improved -O0 code generation for calls to std::move, std::forward, std::move_if_noexcept, std::addressof, and std::as_const. These are now treated as compiler builtins and implemented directly, rather than instantiating the definition from the standard library.

  • Fixed mangling of nested dependent names such as T::a::b, where T is a template parameter, to conform to the Itanium C++ ABI and be compatible with GCC. This breaks binary compatibility with code compiled with earlier versions of clang; use the -fclang-abi-compat=14 option to get the old mangling.

  • Preprocessor character literals with a u8 prefix are now correctly treated as unsigned character literals. This fixes Issue 54886.

  • Stopped allowing constraints on non-template functions to be compliant with dcl.decl.general p4.

  • Improved copy elision optimization. It’s possible to apply NRVO for an object if at the moment when any return statement of this object is executed, the return slot won’t be occupied by another object.

C++20 Feature Support

  • Diagnose consteval and constexpr issues that happen at namespace scope. This partially addresses Issue 51593.

  • No longer attempt to evaluate a consteval UDL function call at runtime when it is called through a template instantiation. This fixes Issue 54578.

  • Implemented __builtin_source_location(), which enables library support for std::source_location.

  • The mangling scheme for C++20 modules has incompatibly changed. The initial mangling was discovered not to be reversible, and the weak ownership design decision did not give the backwards compatibility that was hoped for. C++20 since added extern "C++" semantics that can be used for such compatibility. The demangler now demangles symbols with named module attachment.

  • Enhanced the support for C++20 Modules, including: Partitions, Reachability, Header Unit and extern "C++" semantics.

  • Implemented P1103R3: Merging Modules.

  • Implemented P1779R3: ABI isolation for member functions.

  • Implemented P1874R1: Dynamic Initialization Order of Non-Local Variables in Modules.

  • Partially implemented P1815R2: Translation-unit-local entities.

  • As per “Conditionally Trivial Special Member Functions” (P0848), it is now possible to overload destructors using concepts. Note that the rest of the paper about other special member functions is not yet implemented.

  • Skip rebuilding lambda expressions in arguments of immediate invocations. This fixes GH56183, GH51695, GH50455, GH54872, GH54587.

C++2b Feature Support

CUDA/HIP Language Changes in Clang

  • Added __noinline__ as a keyword to avoid diagnostics due to usage of __attribute__((__noinline__)) in CUDA/HIP programs.

Objective-C Language Changes in Clang

OpenCL Kernel Language Changes in Clang

  • Improved/fixed misc issues in the builtin function support and diagnostics.

  • Improved diagnostics for unknown extension pragma, subgroup functions and implicit function prototype.

  • Added -cl-ext flag to the Clang driver to toggle extensions/features compiled for.

  • Added cl_khr_subgroup_rotate extension.

  • Removed some printf and hostcall related diagnostics when compiling for AMDGPU.

  • Fixed alignment of pointer types in kernel arguments.

ABI Changes in Clang

  • When compiling C for ARM or AArch64, a zero-length bitfield in a struct (e.g. int : 0) no longer prevents the structure from being considered a homogeneous floating-point or vector aggregate. The new behavior agrees with the AAPCS specification, and matches the similar bug fix in GCC 12.1.

  • Targeting AArch64, since D127209 LLVM now only preserves the z8-z23 and p4-p15 registers across a call if the registers z0-z7 or p0-p3 are used to pass data into or out of a subroutine. The new behavior matches the AAPCS. Previously LLVM preserved z8-z23 and p4-p15 across a call if the callee had an SVE type anywhere in its signature. This would cause an incorrect use of the caller-preserved z8-z23 and p4-p15 ABI for example if the 9th argument or greater were the first SVE type in the signature of a function.

  • All copy constructors can now be trivial if they are not user-provided, regardless of the type qualifiers of the argument of the defaulted constructor, fixing dr2171. You can switch back to the old ABI behavior with the flag: -fclang-abi-compat=14.0.

OpenMP Support in Clang

  • Added the support for atomic compare and atomic compare capture (-fopenmp-version=51 is required).

…

CUDA Support in Clang

  • …

X86 Support in Clang

  • Support -mharden-sls=[none|all|return|indirect-jmp] for straight-line speculation hardening.

  • Support for the _Float16 type has been added for all targets with SSE2. When AVX512-FP16 is not available, arithmetic on _Float16 is emulated using float.

  • Added the -m[no-]rdpru flag to enable/disable the RDPRU instruction provided by AMD Zen2 and later processors. Defined intrinsics for using this instruction (see rdpruintrin.h).

  • Support -mstack-protector-guard-symbol=[SymbolName] to use the given symbol for addressing the stack protector guard.

  • -mfunction-return=thunk-extern support was added to clang for x86. This will be used by Linux kernel mitigations for RETBLEED. The corresponding flag -mfunction-return=keep may be appended to disable the feature.

The _Float16 type requires SSE2 feature and above due to the instruction limitations. When using it on i386 targets, you need to specify -msse2 explicitly.

For targets without F16C feature or above, please make sure:

  • Use GCC 12.0 and above if you are using libgcc.

  • If you are using compiler-rt, use the same version with the compiler. Early versions provided FP16 builtins in a different ABI. A workaround is to use a small code snippet to check the ABI if you cannot make sure of it.

  • If you are using downstream runtimes that provide FP16 conversions, update them with the new ABI.

DWARF Support in Clang

  • clang now adds DWARF information for inline strings in C/C++ programs, allowing line:column symbolization of strings. Some debugging programs may require updating, as this takes advantage of DWARF DW_TAG_variable structures without a DW_AT_name field, which is valid DWARF, but may be handled incorrectly by some software (e.g. new failures with incorrect assertions).

Arm and AArch64 Support in Clang

  • clang now supports the Cortex-M85 CPU, which can be chosen with -mcpu=cortex-m85. By default, this has PACBTI turned on, but it can be disabled with -mcpu=cortex-m85+nopacbti.

  • clang now supports using C/C++ operators on sizeless SVE vectors such as svint32_t. The set of supported operators is shown in the table Vector Operations found in the Clang Language Extensions document.

RISC-V Support in Clang

  • Updates to the RISC-V vector intrinsics to align with ongoing additions to the RISC-V Vector intrinsics specification. Additionally, these intrinsics are now generated lazily, resulting a substantial improvement in compile-time for code including the vector intrinsics header.

  • Intrinsics added for the RISC-V scalar crypto (‘K’) extensions.

  • Intrinsics added for the RISC-V CLZ and CTZ instructions in the Zbb extension.

  • An ABI lowering bug (resulting in incorrect LLVM IR generation) was fixed. The bug could be triggered in particular circumstances in C++ when passing a data-only struct that inherits from another struct.

SPIR-V Support in Clang

  • Added flag -fintegrated-objemitter to enable use of experimental integrated LLVM backend when generating SPIR-V binary.

  • The SPIR-V generator continues to produce typed pointers in this release despite the general switch of LLVM to opaque pointers.

Floating Point Support in Clang

Internal API Changes

  • Added a new attribute flag AcceptsExprPack that when set allows expression pack expansions in the parsed arguments of the corresponding attribute. Additionally it introduces delaying of attribute arguments, adding common handling for creating attributes that cannot be fully initialized prior to template instantiation.

Build System Changes

  • CMake -DCLANG_DEFAULT_PIE_ON_LINUX=ON is now the default. This is used by linux-gnu systems to decide whether -fPIE -pie is the default (instead of -fno-pic -no-pie). This matches GCC installations on many Linux distros. Note: linux-android and linux-musl always default to -fPIE -pie, ignoring this variable. -DCLANG_DEFAULT_PIE_ON_LINUX may be removed in the future.

AST Matchers

  • Expanded isInline narrowing matcher to support C++17 inline variables.

  • Added forEachTemplateArgument matcher which creates a match every time a templateArgument matches the matcher supplied to it.

  • Added objcStringLiteral matcher which matches ObjectiveC String literal expressions.

clang-format

  • Important change: Renamed IndentRequires to IndentRequiresClause and changed the default for all styles from false to true.

  • Reworked and improved handling of concepts and requires. Added the RequiresClausePosition option as part of that.

  • Changed BreakBeforeConceptDeclarations from Boolean to an enum.

  • Option InsertBraces has been added to insert optional braces after control statements.

clang-extdef-mapping

  • clang-extdef-mapping now accepts .ast files as input. This is faster than to recompile the files from sources when extracting method definitons. This can be really beneficial when creating .ast files for input to the clang-static-analyzer.

libclang

  • Introduce new option CLANG_FORCE_MATCHING_LIBCLANG_SOVERSION that defaults to ON. This means that by default libclang’s SOVERSION matches the major version of LLVM. Setting this to OFF makes the SOVERSION be the ABI compatible version (currently 13). See discussion here.

  • Added check in clang_getFieldDeclBitWidth for whether a bit-field has an evaluable bit width. Fixes undefined behavior when called on a bit-field whose width depends on a template paramter.

Static Analyzer

  • New CTU implementation that keeps the slow-down around 2x compared to the single-TU analysis, even in case of complex C++ projects. Still, it finds the majority of the “old” CTU findings. Besides, not more than ~3% of the bug reports are lost compared to single-TU analysis, the lost reports are highly likely to be false positives.

  • Added a new checker alpha.unix.cstring.UninitializedRead this will check for uninitialized reads from common memory copy/manipulation functions such as memcpy, mempcpy, memmove, memcmp, strcmp, strncmp, strcpy, strlen, strsep and many more. Although this checker currently is in list of alpha checkers due to a false positive.

  • Added a new checker alpha.unix.Errno. This can find the first read of errno after successful standard function calls, such use of errno could be unsafe.

  • Deprecate the -analyzer-store region and -analyzer-opt-analyze-nested-blocks analyzer flags. These flags are still accepted, but a warning will be displayed. These flags will be rejected, thus turned into a hard error starting with clang-16.

Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (UBSan)

Core Analysis Improvements

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New Issues Found

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Python Binding Changes

The following methods have been added:

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Significant Known Problems

Additional Information

A wide variety of additional information is available on the Clang web page. The web page contains versions of the API documentation which are up-to-date with the Git version of the source code. You can access versions of these documents specific to this release by going into the “clang/docs/” directory in the Clang tree.

If you have any questions or comments about Clang, please feel free to contact us on the Discourse forums (Clang Frontend category).