I'm in college, and for a project we're using C. We've explored GCC and Clang, and Clang appears to be much more user friendly than GCC. As a result, I'm wondering what the advantages or disadvantages are to using clang, as opposed to GCC, for developing in C and C++ on Linux?
In my case this would be used for student level programs, not production.
If I use Clang, should I debug with GDB and use GNU Make, or use another debugger and make utility?
I use both because sometimes they give different, useful error messages.
The Python project was able to find and fix a number of small buglets when one of the core developers first tried compiling with clang.
As of right now, GCC has much better and more complete support for C++11 features than Clang. Also, the code generator for GCC performs better optimisation than the one in Clang (in my experience, I have not seen any exhaustive tests).
On the other hand, Clang often compiles code more quickly than GCC, and produces better error messages when there is something wrong with your code.
The choice of which one to use really depends on what things are important to you. I value C++11 support and code generation quality more than I value convenience of compilation. Because of this, I use GCC. For you, the trade-offs could be different.
I think clang could be an alternative.
GCC and clang have some differences on expressions like a+++++a, and I've got many different answers with my peer who use clang on Mac while I use gcc.
GCC has become the standard, and clang could be an alternative. Because GCC is very stable and clang is still under developing.
For student level programs, Clang has the benefit that it is, by default, stricter wrt. the C standard. For example, the following K&R version of Hello World is accepted without warning by GCC, but rejected by Clang with some pretty descriptive error messages:
main()
{
puts("Hello, world!");
}
With GCC, you have to give it -Werror to get it to really make a point about this not being a valid C89 program. Also, you still need to use c99 or gcc -std=c99 to get the C99 language.
I use both Clang and GCC, I find Clang has some useful warnings, but for my own ray-tracing benchmarks - its consistently 5-15% slower then GCC (take that with grain of salt of course, but attempted to use similar optimization flags for both).
So for now I use Clang static analysis and its warnings with complex macros: (though now GCC's warnings are pretty much as good - gcc4.8 - 4.9).
Some considerations:
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Source: Stackoverflow.com