How to Implement Your First Compiler Feature:The Story of Concepts in Clang
summary
Implements C++20 Concepts in Clang end-to-end: parses concept definitions, adds AST nodes, wires requires clauses, abbreviated templates and the new requires expression into parsing and semantic checking, and drives overload resolution and diagnostics to match the standard. Before that a tooling detour collapses gigantic diagnostics (a reported 1.2 GB of errors), a temporary static_print hack is added to GCC for compile-time debugging. Work spans about a month of initial hacking and ~18 months to reach feature-complete per C++20 and begin merging into mainline.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 4:46About the speaker
- 7:14GCC concepts struggles
- 14:40Adding static print to GCC
- 25:56Deciding to implement concepts
- 28:49First steps in Clang
- 37:15Compiler design principles
- 41:22Planning the implementation
- 46:04Requires expressions challenge
- 47:34Finalizing the feature
- 50:09Key takeaways
- 52:37Q&A
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