What Makes Clang So Special
CoderGears (via Maxime Chevalier):
The most important difference of its design is that Clang is based on LLVM, the idea behind LLVM is to use LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR), it’s like the bytecode for java. LLVM IR is designed to host mid-level analyses and transformations that you find in the optimizer section of a compiler. It was designed with many specific goals in mind, including supporting lightweight runtime optimizations, cross-function/interprocedural optimizations, whole program analysis, and aggressive restructuring transformations, etc. The most important aspect of it, though, is that it is itself defined as a first class language with well-defined semantics.
