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by exDM69 1184 days ago
No, not really. LLVM is not a C compiler, it consumes an intermediate representation. Clang is the C compiler which produces LLVM IR.

Likewise, GCC contains a C compiler but the machine specific parts like the codegen take an intermediate representation (GCC has several) as input.

Almost no compilers out there compile directly from C to machine code, there is one or more intermediate forms in between. C is not a good input language for an optimizing compiler.

It's a good and entirely valid comparison. It's the backend codegen that is being compared, the language frontend does not really play a part in it.