LLVM/Clang 16 is bringing many new features including initial AMD Zen 4 support (still missing the tuning), Intel Emerald Rapids support , Intel Meteor Lake support, Intel Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge support , an Xtensa architecture back-end , JIT support for OpenMP offloading , -Ofast and -ffast-math for Flang , -mcpu=native / -mtune=native for RISC-V , many new features implemented in libc++, Zstd compression for ELF / debug sections, LLVM is now built with C++17 by default, Arm Neoverse V2 support, the LoongArch back-end is no longer treated as experimental, a light AVX mode , and various other enhancements.
For those wanting to help in testing LLVM 16.0-rc1 is available via GitHub .
LLVM developers are planning for LLVM 16.0-rc2 around 7 February, LLVM 16.0-rc3 around 21 February, and to ideally ship LLVM 16.0 stable on 7 March. After that LLVM 16.0 will continue with seeing bi-weekly point releases as has become normal practice for this open-source compiler stack.