[TUSF]

> Is it still so after ditching LLVM?

Zig hasn't ditched LLVM, nor does it really plan to. What's planned is for the main Zig executable to not directly depend on LLVM, that way contributors to the compiler can still develop on the code base without needing to set up and compile LLVM on their systems. Zig does plan to eventually supersede LLVM's functions with their own custom backends, but in the short term, this only means using the new backend as a debug compiler (for faster compilations, to allow for a better developer feedback loop) and it won't be until the distant future that LLVM could feasibly be dropped as a dependency entirely, if the devs ever decide to actually go through with that.