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by piokuc 3450 days ago
The beauty of LLVM is that developers of compilers based on LLVM like Pony or Julia don't have to even think about the backends.
2 comments

Unfortunately that's only superficially true. You have to care about GC interop, unwind & debug dwarf data, implementing part of the ABI in the frontend, and of course the occasional bugs when you exercise code path that clang does not.

Because of this, enabling a new backend is a substantial amount of work even if the instruction selection/generation is indeed taken care of for you.

Sounds like you have some practical experience with that. What frontend was it? Are these problems frontend/language independent?
Same applies to JVM and CLR.