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LLVM VS Doxygen

Compare LLVM VS Doxygen and see what are their differences

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LLVM logo LLVM

LLVM is a compiler infrastructure designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and...

Doxygen logo Doxygen

Generate documentation from source code
  • LLVM Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-11-06
  • Doxygen Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30

LLVM features and specs

  • Modularity
    LLVM is designed to be modular and flexible, allowing developers to utilize only the components they need for their specific tasks. This makes it versatile for a wide range of use cases.
  • Optimization
    LLVM provides advanced optimization techniques that allow for efficient code execution across various platforms. It utilizes a variety of standard and state-of-the-art optimization passes to improve performance.
  • Cross-Platform Support
    LLVM supports a wide range of architectures and platforms, enabling developers to build and deploy applications across multiple target environments without needing to make significant code changes.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    The LLVM project includes a wide array of tools and libraries, such as Clang and LLDB, that enhance development capabilities and provide comprehensive support for different programming languages.
  • Community and Industry Adoption
    LLVM has a robust and active community, along with backing from major technology companies. This means consistent updates, improvements, and a broad support network for troubleshooting and enhancements.

Possible disadvantages of LLVM

  • Complexity
    Due to its extensive feature set and flexibility, LLVM can be complex to understand and use, particularly for newcomers who may find its detailed API and documentation challenging.
  • Resource Intensive
    The advanced optimizations and capabilities provided by LLVM can require significant compute resources, which might not be suitable for all systems or use cases, particularly those with limited capabilities.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    LLVM's power and flexibility come with a steep learning curve, demanding a strong understanding of compiler design and architecture to fully leverage its potential.
  • Limited Legacy Support
    While LLVM supports many modern architectures, its focus on newer platforms means that it may offer limited functionality for legacy systems or older processor architectures.
  • Lack of High-Level Language Features
    LLVM is primarily focused on compiler and intermediate representation infrastructure, which means that it does not provide some high-level language features or abstractions unless provided by front-end tools.

Doxygen features and specs

  • Comprehensive Documentation
    Doxygen supports a wide range of languages and can generate detailed, organized documentation for various types of codebases, including class hierarchies, collaboration diagrams, and more.
  • Automatic Code Parsing
    Doxygen automatically parses the code and extracts relevant comments, which helps in creating accurate and up-to-date documentation without much manual intervention.
  • Customizable Output
    Doxygen allows customization of the output format with several templates, enabling developers to generate documentation in HTML, LaTeX, RTF, and other formats.
  • Integration with Other Tools
    Doxygen integrates well with other tools such as Graphviz for generating diagrams, and it can be incorporated into continuous integration pipelines to ensure documentation is always current.
  • Open Source
    Doxygen is open-source software, meaning it is free to use and has a community of contributors that may add features or fix issues over time.

Possible disadvantages of Doxygen

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Due to its extensive features and customization options, Doxygen can be quite complex to set up and use effectively, especially for beginners.
  • Performance Issues
    For very large codebases, Doxygen can be slow in processing and generating the documentation, which might be a limitation for some projects.
  • Limited Support for Non-Standard Code Constructs
    Doxygen may have difficulties interpreting non-standard code constructs or highly complex code, which could lead to incomplete or inaccurate documentation.
  • Dependency on Code Comments
    The quality and usefulness of the generated documentation heavily depend on the thoroughness and clarity of the comments within the code, requiring disciplined commenting practices.
  • Outdated Documentation
    If not regularly maintained and regenerated, the produced documentation can become outdated as the codebase evolves, leading to potential misinformation.

Analysis of Doxygen

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Doxygen is considered a good tool, especially for projects where maintaining documentation is crucial. Its ability to integrate with various development environments and version control systems, along with its configurability and range of output formats, makes it a robust choice for automatically generating up-to-date project documentation.

Why this product is good

  • Doxygen is a widely used tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources, and it supports other programming languages including C, Objective-C, C#, PHP, Java, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, and D. It is valuable for its ability to extract code structure and comments to produce comprehensive documentation in various formats like HTML, LaTeX, and RTF. It also has support for generating diagrams and cross-references, which improves documentation readability and navigation.

Recommended for

  • Developers working in medium to large codebases that need robust documentation.
  • Teams using C++ or any of the supported languages who want to ensure their code documentation is consistently updated and accessible.
  • Projects where it is crucial to have an easily navigable documentation site with features like search, diagrams, and cross-references.
  • Open source projects that want to maintain high-quality, automatically generated documentation.

LLVM videos

Interview with LLVM Foundation President Tanya Lattner

More videos:

  • Review - [COSCUP2021] A trip about how I contribute to LLVM
  • Review - Introduction to LLVM Building simple program analysis tools and instrumentation

Doxygen videos

Doxygen

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to LLVM and Doxygen)
IDE
100 100%
0% 0
Documentation
0 0%
100% 100
Email Marketing
100 100%
0% 0
Documentation As A Service & Tools

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare LLVM and Doxygen

LLVM Reviews

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Doxygen Reviews

Best 25 Software Documentation Tools 2023
Doxygen is a popular documentation generator tool that is commonly used in software development projects to automatically generate documentation from source code comments.
Source: www.uphint.com
Introduction to Doxygen Alternatives In 2021
Doxygen is the software application for developing paperwork from illustrated C++ sources, but other programming languages like C, C#, Objective-C, UNO/OpenOffice, PHP, Java, IDL of Corba, Python, and Microsoft, VHDL, Fortran are also supported. From a collection of recorded source files, user can develop an HTML online documents web browser and an offline referral manual....
Source: www.webku.net
Doxygen Alternatives
Doxygen is the software for creating documentation from illustrated C++ sources, but other programming languages like C, C#, Objective-C, UNO/OpenOffice, PHP, Java, IDL of Corba, Python, and Microsoft, VHDL, Fortran are also supported. From a collection of documented source files, user can create an HTML online documentation browser and an offline reference manual. It also...
Source: www.educba.com
Doxygen Alternatives
Since the documentation is directly extracted from the sources, it is a lot less difficult to maintain the compatibility between the source code and the documentation. Having said that, this tax has a few problems with it. Therefore, I have compiled a list of some of the other options available to you besides Doxygen.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, LLVM seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 55 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

LLVM mentions (55)

  • macOS Sequoia is certified to Unix 03
    Apple has made some substantial open source contributions. - LLVM - https://llvm.org/ - They are the stewards of CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) - https://www.cups.org/ - Darwin kernel is open source - https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Why you should keep an eye on Apache DataFusion and its community.
    Similarly, LLVM revolutionized the world of programming languages and compilers. Since its creation, we've seen many new languages being created of increased complexity. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Yes, Ruby is fast, but…
    In conclusion, none of the proposed changes to the Ruby version of the code makes a dent in the Crystal version. This is not entirely Crystal's doing: it uses the LLVM backend, which generates very optimized binaries. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Playing with DragonRuby Game Toolkit (DRGTK)
    This Ruby implementation is based on mruby and LLVM and it’s commercial software but cheap. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Which books/resources to understand modern Assembler?
    'Computer Architeture: A Quantitative Apporach" and/or more specific design types (mips, arm, etc) can be found under the Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architeture and Design. "Getting Started with LLVM Core Libraries: Get to Grips With Llvm Essentials and Use the Core Libraries to Build Advanced Tools " "The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Volume 1) : LLVM" https://aosabook.org/en/v1/llvm.html... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
View more

Doxygen mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Doxygen yet. Tracking of Doxygen recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing LLVM and Doxygen, you can also consider the following products

clang - C, C++, Objective C and Objective C++ front-end for the LLVM compiler.

GitBook - Modern Publishing, Simply taking your books from ideas to finished, polished books.

GNU Compiler Collection - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting...

DocFX - A documentation generation tool for API reference and Markdown files!

Tiny C Compiler - The Tiny C Compiler is an x86, x86-64 and ARM processor C compiler created by Fabrice Bellard.

MkDocs - Project documentation with Markdown.