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by simondotau 25 days ago
It makes perfect sense to ditch LLVM in development contexts, as its slowness is antithetical to developer productivity — most obviously in tight edit-compile-test loops. And this becomes orders of magnitude more salient when the edit-compile-test loop is being driven by AI.

But even when languages are described as "moving away" that usually means building their own very fast-compiling/min-optimising x64/ARM backend for development builds, while still acknowledging the need for LLVM for highly optimised release builds.

1 comments

For developer productivity, you can move to a REPL workflow with edit-compile-test at the function level. Julia does this while staying on LLVM.

Of course, compile-the-world is still going to be slow, but there is no solution for that in the C++/Rust ecosystems either.