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It's not so much the layers of abstraction -- our machines quite literally do more but the software, at least on the surface, looks the same. I remember when Office added the real-time squiggle line spellchecking -- now that's everywhere including this browser textbox. If you go back a few years, you'll find a lot of software that is best described now as primitive.

Abstraction layers are always slow -- PC's getting faster never makes them feel fast because our expectations of what software should do increases at the same rate.

With ahead-of-time compilation, not all the layers even have to have a representation at runtime so the overhead can be really minimal.

I thought it was ensuring that LLVM could run everything :)