The LLVM project has announced the release of LLVM 8.0.0, which brings with it a wealth of new features including the first support for the open RISC-V architecture in the lld linker.

Released this week, LLVM 8.0.0 includes a range of enhancements to the compiler and toolchain collection. “This release contains the work on trunk up to Subversion revision r351319, plus work on the release branch,” explains Hans Wennborg. “It’s the result of the LLVM community’s work over the past six months, including: speculative load hardening, concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API, no longer experimental WebAssembly target, a Clang option to initialise automatic variables, improved pre-compiled header support in clang-cl, the /Zc:dllexportInlines- flag, RISC-V support in lld. And as usual, many bug fixes, optimization and diagnostics improvements, etc.”

It’s the last key feature that is of the most interest: while LLVM itself has supported the open RISC-V instruction set architecture since November 2017, the lld linker has not – until lld 8.0.0. The new version of the linker also includes a range of bug fixes, initial support for the MSP430 instruction set architecture, the ability to link against import libraries produced by GNU tools, and automatic importation of data variables from DLLs.

More information on the new features in LLVM 8.0.0 can be found in the release notes, and can be downloaded via the LLVM releases site.