Building Clang and libc++ on Ubuntu\Debian Linux

Clang with libc++ represents today a viable alternative to GCC for C and C++ programmers. I make no claim that Clang with libc++ is necessarily superior to GCC with libstdc++, but it is definitely a more feature complete C++11 alternative. According to the libc++ website, libc++ is 100% complete C++11 implementation on Apple’s OS X and, from my tests, works equally well on Linux. Even if you plan to ship your C++ application compiled with GCC, I think it is a good test to check your app for errors by building it with a different compiler and library.

In this short post, I’m going to show you how to build the latest Clang and libc++ on a Linux box. I’ve tested this procedure on Ubuntu 12.04.1, Ubuntu 12.10 and Linux Mint 14.

Let’s start by updating your Linux system (this is a recommended but optional step), open a Terminal and paste the next two lines:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now, let’s install some additional, but necessary, apps: