[cfe-dev] [LLVMdev] [RFC] Raising LLVM minimum required MSVC version to 2013 for trunk

[Óscar Fuentes]

Alex Rosenberg <alexr at leftfield.org> writes:

> On Aug 23, 2014, at 1:24 PM, Renato Golin <renato.golin at linaro.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Also,
>> compiling Clang with MSVC and making Clang MSVC compatible are two
>> completely different things. A commercial toolchain based on MSVC
>> compatibility doesn't necessarily need to be compiled with MSVC
>> itself.
>
> But it must. If you want to be able to use LLVM DLLs inside a Windows
> app, it has to be built with MSVC because they have their own C++ ABI.

This is false. LLVM libraries can be used on C++ Windows applications
just fine without using MSVC at all.

> At some point, Clang will support Microsoft's ABI well enough to
> consider a bootstrap instead.

AFAIK Clang bootstraps on MinGW-w64.

To go back on topic: C++ features advertised by MSVC as recently
supported usually are too immature to be used on practice. So looking at
a brochure is not enough when deciding what you gain when you upgrade
your MSVC install.