Hi Piotr,
it is great to see the story behind your recent pull requests. Thanks for sharing it. I'm happy to read that the experience left such a good impression on you.
On 10.11.20 22:30, Piotr Tworek wrote:
The reaason I'm writing this email is to ask if Genode project would be potentially interested in having clang support in the main repo? I know that officialy supporting another compiler might not be an interesting prospect for the project and I won't mind if the answer is no.
We (as Genode Labs) are unable to officially offer support for a second compiler besides GCC because this addition would imply the need to double our CI efforts. But this economic constraint should not stand in the way of people who are fine with using another compiler at their own risk. As nicely illustrated by your pull request [1], the quality of our code base can only benefit from it.
[1] https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/pull/3938
Besides the code-quality aspect, I find your direction interesting for two other reasons also.
First, I foresee an increasing relevance of tools like clang-tidy for our project. In the back of my head, I'm thinking of potential ways to formalize the use of Genode's coding style [2] beyond mere conventions. The clang project would be the most natural basis for creating a static analyzer with custom rules.
Second, when considering future support for languages like Rust or Zig, which rely on LLVM as their basis, we will need to attain a certain degree of compiler interoperability. Lowering the friction between Genode and Clang will ultimately help in this respect.
[2] https://genodians.org/nfeske/2019-01-22-conscious-c++
Its enough for me if generic fixes I make get merged :). If there is an interest in clang support however, I'll be happy to spend a few evenings cleaning up my work and making a few more PRs out of it. If needed I can also push my remaing clang support patches in the existing, slightly chaotic form, to some branch so Genode developers can see how much work having clang support in Genode would entail.
Your generic fixes are more than welcome. :-)
I'm certainly supportive for giving Genode users the choice to use Clang as an option as long as it cannot be mistaken as a feature officially provided by Genode Labs. The documentation of this option could simply clarify that. So please don't hesitate to go forward. But don't feel pressured to hurry either.
Cheers Norman