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by masklinn 2470 days ago
That's correct. LLVM was started at UIUC, Apple later hired Lattner with the intention of making LLVM production-ready (in part as a replacement for the GNU toolchain), and ultimately to replace the GCC frontend by a custom / dedicated one.

The Clang project is part of the LLVM ecosystem, but is a major effort in its own right, so I think it is right to give credit where credit is due, in the same way e.g. the Rust compiler uses Rust as a backend, but credit for it doesn't to to the LLVM project.

1 comments

Apple did not hire Lattner for clang, that was started by him as a kind of submarine project until it was mature enough to show to management.

He mentions this in some of his interviews.

> Apple did not hire Lattner for clang

I didn't write that they did? Though I can see where my wording would be misleading.