[cfe-dev] Query: Is clang an "Apple product"?

[David Chisnall]

On 2 Oct 2014, at 18:46, Robinson, Paul <Paul_Robinson at playstation.sony.com> wrote:

> Apple delivers a version of clang (as part of Xcode?) and it's not unheard
> of for a vendor to include proprietary changes (I don't know whether Apple
> does this).  In that sense the clang-that-Apple-delivers could be reasonably
> considered an "Apple product."

This is visible on the command line on OS X:

$ clang -v
Apple LLVM version 6.0 (clang-600.0.51) (based on LLVM 3.5svn)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0
Thread model: posix
$ /opt/llvm/bin/clang -v
clang version 3.5.0 
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0
Thread model: posix

The first of these is an Apple product.  The latter is not.  However, both are open source, with the code for the former being available from:

http://opensource.apple.com/source/clang/clang-503.0.38/

I've not looked at this version, but periodically Apple-clang releases contain patches that are not yet in the main tree (although they usually appear quite soon.  The ARM64 back end was an example of one that took a little while to be merged).

Generally, the Apple product and the open source product converge and diverge over time, as the release cycles for the two don't quite line up.

David