I addition to cdavid's comment: LLVM IR is system independent. So if you had a deployment over heterogeneous machines you could write the extension code once and have it run everywhere without recompilation.

I was confused about this too, but I think the idea is that it's easier to infer type information from the bitcode than from raw object code.

more closely related to ctypes than swig.

swig requires glue code (.i files) to be written and generated, then compiled. ctypes can take a system native library (.so or .dll) and access it.

bitey, on the other hand, uses platform-neutral llvm bytecode. imagine ctypes but platform neutral. that's bitey.

pretty darned cool.

once you can import llvm code at runtime, you are pretty close to injecting llvm code at runtime: you write some LLVM IR in a string, and "llvm_eval" it.