I was not aware of intentional instability of llvm and clang APIs. That certainly causes havoc.
Thanks for the suggestion about building separately ROOT’s llvm and clang. I suppose I can count on ROOT build system checking compatibility between given build of llvm and clang and the current version of ROOT, right? So that I will hit cmake error if there is some development in llvm or clang that new ROOT version needs, as opposite to hitting a compilation error few minutes in the build process.
@vvassilev@Axel@pcanal@amadio
I didn’t get an answer on how ROOT build system controls compatibility with ROOT-patches of LLVM and CLANG. Supposing that the head of ROOT-patches is right now compatible with the recent ROOT pro (e.g. v6-16-00) and supposing in 2 days 3 commits are added to ROOT-patches that are then required by ROOT v6-18-00. Now let’s suppose, that I try to build ROOT v6-18-00 against the current ROOT-patches which doesn’t contain these 3 commits. What will happen?
@amarcine I don’t think that there is any mechanism in the build system to ensure you are using a compatible LLVM/Clang version other than just the version check for 5.0.x. That said, the LLVM/Clang in ROOT has not changed much recently, so it probably remains compatible, although the external one based on ROOT-patches may not support C++ runtime modules yet.
So ROOT-patches is not updated along with LLVM inside ROOT?
As for the 5.0.x version check, is version incremented in ROOT-patches to allow for these compatibility checks or is this version just the one which is the base for ROOT-patches? Looking at tags of ROOT-patches, they do not seem to correspond to 5.0.x scheme of LLVM/CLANG versioning nor to ROOT versioning.
While I understand that pushing upstream patches to LLVM/CLANG made for ROOT is problematic and one cannot really assure compatibility of new LLVM releases with ROOT, ROOT-patches is fully under ROOT control, so I thought it should not be a major effort to assure that it is updated and that there is matching between versions there and ROOT versions.
Do you mean why do I ask the question? If so, let me summarize the discussion up to now: In a situation when I build ROOT from scratch, I wanted to reduce build time by disabling builtin llvm and clang. I was told that I cannot use official clang, so the only option is to build ROOT-patches llvm with clang. So I wanted to know to what extent this is safe. Now it looks like this is not really safe, because ROOT-patches are not synchronized with ROOT and there is no mechanism of matching ROOT versions with ROOT-patches versions.
I see. Yes indeed - for the time being and esp regarding efficiency I’d recommend to “simply” build llvm + clang with ROOT. This will improve in the future.