[marssaxman]

> Is llvm still relevant outside of academia?

I am surprised by the question. In my experience of the industry, LLVM has become dominant to a degree which makes some of the work kind of boring.

I expect MLIR will eventually become similarly universal. In the compiler I am currently working on, we render the AST straight into an MLIR dialect - every node becomes an op - and the rest of the frontend is implemented in terms of MLIR passes.

[GianFabien]

Generating "good" machine code from MLIR requires a huge amount of effort. With the numerous variants of instruction sets (even within a single line, e.g. x86-64), the optimisations and instruction selection is a complex task.

[marssaxman]

It did not seem especially burdensome last time I tried it. Are you familiar with the LLVM dialect of MLIR?