Video: How Nintendo Transitioned From Proprietary To Open Source With Switch

The 2018 LLVM Developers’ Meeting has uploaded an 18 minute long video featuring Nintendo of America’s Bob Campbell sharing insights on how the Switch was developed.

In the video, Campbell reveals that developer tools for the Switch were developed with Clang/LLVM. Another important transition made by Nintendo was shifting from using proprietary tools and libraries to open tools and libraries.

Check out the video for more details:

Nintendo Switch was developed using Clang/LLVM for the developer tools and C++ libraries. We describe how we converted from using almost exclusively proprietary tools and libraries to open tools and libraries. We’ll also describe our process for maintaining our out-of-tree toolchain and what we’d like to improve.

We started with Clang, binutils, and LLVM C++ libraries (libc++, libc++abi) and other open libraries. We will also describe our progress in transitioning to LLD and other LLVM binutils equivalents. Additionally, we will share some of our performance results using LLD and LTO.

Finally, we’ll discuss some of the areas that are important to our developers moving forward.