Clang is the "C Language Family Front-end", which means we intend to support the most popular members of the C family. We are convinced that the right parsing technology for this class of languages is a hand-built recursive-descent parser. Because it is plain C++ code, recursive descent makes it very easy for new developers to understand the code, it easily supports ad-hoc rules and other strange hacks required by C/C++, and makes it straight-forward to implement excellent diagnostics and error recovery.
Clang is the "C Language Family Front-end", which means we intend to support the most popular members of the C family. We are convinced that the right parsing technology for this class of languages is a hand-built recursive-descent parser. Because it is plain C++ code, recursive descent makes it very easy for new developers to understand the code, it easily supports ad-hoc rules and other strange hacks required by C/C++, and makes it straight-forward to implement excellent diagnostics and error recovery.