Chromium ships a prebuilt clang binary. It's just upstream clang built at a known-good revision that we bump every two weeks or so.
This is the only supported compiler for building Chromium.
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is_clang = false
will make the build use system gcc on Linux. There are no
bots that test this and there is no guarantee it will work, but we accept
patches for this configuration.
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/clang/topics
The chromium style plugin is used by default when clang is used.
If you're working on the plugin, you can build it locally like so:
- Run
./tools/clang/scripts/build.py --without-android
to build the plugin. - Run
ninja -C third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/
to build incrementally. - Build with clang like described above, but, if you use goma, disable it.
To test the FindBadConstructs plugin, run:
(cd tools/clang/plugins/tests && \
./test.py ../../../../third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/bin/clang \
../../../../third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/lib/libFindBadConstructs.so)
Since the plugin is rolled with clang changes, behavior changes to the plugin should be guarded by flags to make it easy to roll clang. A general outline:
- Implement new plugin behavior behind a flag.
- Wait for a compiler roll to bring in the flag.
- Start passing the new flag in
GN
and verify the new behavior. - Enable the new plugin behavior unconditionally and update the plugin to ignore the flag.
- Wait for another compiler roll.
- Stop passing the flag from
GN
. - Remove the flag completely.
clang is the default compiler on Windows. It uses MSVC's SDK, so you still need to have Visual Studio with C++ support installed.
Set clang_base_path
in your args.gn to the llvm build directory containing
bin/clang
(i.e. the directory you ran cmake). This must be an absolute
path. You also need to disable chromium's clang plugin.
Here's an example that also disables debug info and enables the component build (both not strictly necessary, but they will speed up your build):
clang_base_path = getenv("HOME") + "/src/llvm-build"
clang_use_chrome_plugins = false
is_debug = false
symbol_level = 1
is_component_build = true
On Windows, for clang_base_path
use something like this instead:
clang_base_path = "c:/src/llvm-build"
You can then run head out/gn/toolchain.ninja
and check that the first to
lines set cc
and cxx
to your clang binary. If things look good, run ninja -C out/gn
to build.
Chromium tries to be buildable with its currently pinned clang, and with clang
trunk. Set llvm_force_head_revision = true
in your args.gn if the clang you're
trying to build with is closer to clang trunk than to Chromium's pinned clang
(which tools/clang/scripts/update.py --print-revision
prints).