Recently [John Spicer] of the EDG C++ compiler front-end project announced that the project will be made open source, from now on managed by the non-profit C++ Alliance. Related source code can be found on the GitHub account.
The Edison Design Group (EDG) is a US company which has made compiler front-ends since 1988, previously also for Java and Fortran. They are used in the Intel C++ compiler, Microsoft’s VC++, NVIDIA’s CUDA compiler, as well as many other commercial products. Last year the decision was made to shutdown the company in 2026 and transition to an open source model, with the details outlined on the EDGCPP site.
Although far from the only C++ front-end, EDGCPP will be very interesting still for supporting bleeding-edge features and having been used in such wide-ranging, demanding applications by a host of commercial customers. For most of us C++ developers our contact with it will have been via the MSVC and Intel Compiler Collection tooling, but of course it’s just one part of the entire toolset.
We’re looking forward to seeing what this means for the wider open source C++ ecosystem, especially as it pertains to GCC and LLVM’s Clang.