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by IshKebab 243 days ago
Yeah because everything was built with GCC when LLVM was first created and it hasn't displaced them all yet. It will though. All new languages use LLVM as a backend - nobody is using GCC. Every company that writes some kind of custom tooling (e.g. for AI) uses LLVM. Most compiler research is done on LLVM.

It will take a very long time (30 years maybe?) - I did say slowly - but the direction of travel is pretty clear.
1 comments
uecker 243 days ago
LLVM is the playground for new languages and those that want to avoid GPL. But it is also a bloated mess. I personally prefer to invest my (limited) time into GCC, but actually hope that something new comes up. Or rather, that those big frameworks get decomposed into modular tooling around common standards and intermediate languages.
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IshKebab 243 days ago
Yeah I agree it's a mess, but it's a mess that you can integrate with and augment fairly easily. There's definitely scope for a cleaner modern replacement (maybe written in Rust?). Absolutely enormous amount of work though so I won't hold my breath.
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uecker 243 days ago
I hope for a Unix-like system written in C and a good C compiler toolbox. I would happily remove all the other nonsense - including Rust - from my life.
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