So many of our tools are accustom to and developed against the gcc compiler; however, the preferred (default in some cases) is now clang on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. One of the problems is that clang has a bunch of “builtin” function definitions, and those builtins can conflict with the normal header files we are used to using.

One way to deal with that is to just undef the built in copy. This is not a good long term solution as we need to migrate on over to clang and it’s built ins on OS X. Nonetheless, it will get you back up and working.

For example say it was failing to compile due to a conflict with strlcpy. You could do the following to undefine the built in.

#ifdef strlcpy
#undef strlcpy
#endif

The full set, from clang/Basic/Builtins.def, is:

LIBBUILTIN(calloc, "v*zz",        "f",     "stdlib.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(malloc, "v*z",         "f",     "stdlib.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(realloc, "v*v*z",      "f",     "stdlib.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(memcpy, "v*v*vC*z",    "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(memcmp, "ivC*vC*z",    "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(memmove, "v*v*vC*z",   "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strncpy, "c*c*cC*z",   "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strncmp, "icC*cC*z",   "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strncat, "c*c*cC*z",   "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strxfrm, "zc*cC*z",    "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(memchr, "v*vC*iz",     "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strcspn, "zcC*cC*",    "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strspn, "zcC*cC*",     "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(memset, "v*v*iz",      "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strlen, "zcC*",        "f",     "string.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(snprintf, "ic*zcC*.",  "fp:2:", "stdio.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(vsnprintf, "ic*zcC*a", "fP:2:", "stdio.h", ALL_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(alloca, "v*z",         "f",     "stdlib.h", ALL_GNU_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(stpncpy, "c*c*cC*z",   "f",     "string.h", ALL_GNU_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strndup, "c*cC*z",     "f",     "string.h", ALL_GNU_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(bzero, "vv*z",         "f",     "strings.h", ALL_GNU_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strncasecmp, "icC*cC*z", "f",   "strings.h", ALL_GNU_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strlcpy, "zc*cC*z",    "f",     "string.h", ALL_GNU_LANGUAGES)
LIBBUILTIN(strlcat, "zc*cC*z",    "f",     "string.h", ALL_GNU_LANGUAGES)