Cranelift is a general-purpose compiler like LLVM is, but its goals are different: it is targeted toward applications like JITs where faster compilation is important. It is intended to be a peer of browser JITs' optimizing tiers. In our README [0] we link some results where we're ~14% slower than LLVM but with ~10x faster compilation.

We also have an explicit focus on correctness, simplicity, and verification. One could argue that in practice LLVM is used everywhere and has dozens of active core contributors, that bugs and missed optimizations are shallow at that scale, and it's hard to compete with that; and there is some merit in that... but our codebase is two orders of magnitude smaller, and we're actively engaging with academics and designing things -- our lowering DSL, our regalloc's symbolic verifier, our fuzzing-first approach -- to get the most mileage we can out of our efforts. It seems to be working OK so far!

[0] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/crane...