Clang is a compiler front end for the C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ programming languages, as well as the OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA, and HIP frameworks. It acts as a drop-in replacement for the GNU Compiler Collection, supporting most of its compilation flags and unofficial language extensions.

What is clang used for?

The Clang tool is a front end compiler that is used to compile programming languages such as C++, C, Objective C++ and Objective C into machine code. Clang is also used as a compiler for frameworks like OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA and HIP.

How does Clang compiler work?

Like many other compilers design, Clang compiler has three phase: The front end that parses source code, checking it for errors, and builds a language-specific Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) to represent the input code. The optimizer: its goal is to do some optimization on the AST generated by the front end.