[mlugg]

> The current interim plan...

What do you mean by "interim"? As I explicitly stated in the comment you quoted, it has never, and likely will never, been planned for the Zig compiler to become incapable of using LLVM. The LLVM backend still sees plenty of active development by the core team [0]---that's perfectly compatible with improving the experience of users (including ourselves) by avoiding unnecessary uses of LLVM [1].

> ...is for Zig to generate LLVM binary files that can be passed to a separate LLVM instance as part of the build process. Is that "a first-class supported backend target for compilation"? I suppose it's a matter of semantics, but that certainly won't be the current LLVM backend that does LLVM API calls.

I think you are incorrectly assuming that we currently make heavy use of the LLVM API. As indicated by #13265 being closed, that is not true. The Zig compiler already generates bitcode by itself, without touching the LLVM API. The only thing we actually use the LLVM API for is feeding that bitcode to LLVM, which can easily be done by invoking a CLI instead. Users quite literally would not be able to tell if, for instance, we changed the compiler to pass the bitcode to Zig's embedded build of Clang over CLI.

[0]: https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-04-08

[1]: https://ziglang.org/download/0.15.1/release-notes.html#x86-B...