clang (from LLVM) can be used to compile against dietlibc, but it can not be used to compile dietlibc itself. The reason is that dietlibc uses gas (the GNU assembler, part of binutils) features in the assembly parts that are not yet supported by clang. The build process compensates by passing -fno-integrated-as to clang, but that makes compilation with clang much slower than compilation with gcc. Still, the end result appears to work. Note that the resulting binaries are larger. Here is the diet binary for comparison. Compiled with gcc 5.2: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8176 Jul 4 20:43 diet Compiled with clang 3.6.2: -rwxr-xr-x 1 leitner users 8560 Jul 29 14:49 bin-x86_64/diet-i