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Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

When did they start calling it Apple Clang? It was Apple LLVM Compiler for the longest time.

As far back as 2007 it was called clang. I'm not sure if it was called clang internally before that. See the seventh slide in the linked presentation.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190403123249/http://llvm.org/d...

Apple has publicly referred to the compiler that they ship with Xcode as the "Apple LLVM Compiler", even though the command line tool was still "clang". E.g., `clang --version` might have reported "Apple LLVM version 7.0.0 (clang-700.1.76)" instead of what it says now, "Apple clang version 14.0.3" on my system.

MacPorts suggests that the --version string changed in Xcode 11 with macOS 10.14 Mojave, but I don't know if the Clang name was reflected in the Xcode GUI at that point. https://trac.macports.org/wiki/XcodeVersionInfo

They're not the same thing.

Clang is a compiler for C and C++ and Objective-C and Objective-C++.

LLVM is the underlying technology which is used by clang, but it's also used by other compilers (e.g. Swift uses LLVM, and some major JavaScript compilers as well).

Neither is owned by Apple - they're open source projects with contributors from Microsoft, Google, ARM, Intel, AMD and many others.

Apple has publicly referred to the C/C++/Objective-C compiler that ships with Xcode as the "Apple LLVM Compiler", apparently a marketing name for their variant of Clang. I was commenting on the fact that the linked article refers to "Apple Clang" which is a deviation from a long-standing practice. I understand the difference between Clang and LLVM; I've committed to both.

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