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by the_duke 3390 days ago
You should really check your facts before posting a statement like this.

While the VM in LLVM historically was short for Virtual Machine, it really has nothing to do with that. It's a compiler backend used by Clang (C++ compiler) and Rust.
2 comments
Hongxu 3390 days ago
LLVM IR apparently is not restricted to C/C++/Objc/Swift etc, it is a generally purposed IR; and LLVM itself is an infrastructure that contains many facilities to deal with compilation backends (mostly, analyses and transformations).
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acjohnson55 3390 days ago
My understanding is that IR is designed as though there were a VM to run it, but in practice, IR is immediately used to generate code for a target architecture.
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dbaupp 3390 days ago
That might have been true originally, but I don't think anyone uses LLVM like a JVM/CLR-esque VM any more. As the parent states, the original Low-Level Virtual Machine initialism was even retracted, meaning the project's name is just the "arbitrary" sequence of letters LLVM, with no particular meaning assigned to them.
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