Be wary of the optical illusion of the hype cycle, if you base yourself on HN's frontpage you'd think that Rust is more important than C++. In my experience GCC is still the default C and C++ compiler on Linux in most of the industry. If it ain't broke, why change it?

Even though I still use GCC to build by C code I'm very happy that LLVM exists, it brought some new blood and much needed competition to the FLOSS compiler scene. It also gave a better architecture to build on if you want to create a new language, it's great that a language like Rust for instance can generate such good machine code by building on top of the LLVM backend. In the GCC-only days the easiest way to create a new compiled language was to emit C as an intermediary target...