[cfe-users] Building with Clang (on Windows) - but for Linux

[Dallman, John via cfe-users]

> BTW - I often see Clang described as "llvm" or "cfe" and I've often wondered
> what they stand for ??

LLVM is "Low Level Virtual Machine". That name is a bit confusing, because this isn't the kind of "Virtual Machine" you get from VMWare or the like, but a way of representing programs for a non-existent, hence "virtual," computer architecture. It was created for use in compilers: you have a front-end that translates programming languages into the LLVM representation, and a back-end that generates object files for a specific processor and operating system. That means that to create compilers for X different languages to run on Y different platforms, you only need to write X front-ends and Y backends, rather than X*Y separate compilers. "cfe" is the "C front-end" which also handles C++ and the "Objective" variants of C and C++.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM

The idea of having a well-defined intermediate representation for compilers and related tools has been around for nearly sixty years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPL_(programming_language)) but LLVM seems to be the most successful implementation to date.

--
John Dallman

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