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> LLVM is NOT required. BarraCUDA does its own instruction encoding like an adult.

This is not an advantage since you will now not benefit from any improvements in LLVM.

Nor will they be restricted by the LLVM design. That project is huge and generic trying to be everything and target everything (and takes ages to rebuild if you need some changes). Sometimes it's better to go simple and targeted - time will tell if that's the right choice.

Zluda used LLVM and ended up bundling a patched version to achieve what they wanted https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zluda-update-q4-2025/

> Although we strive to emit the best possible LLVM bitcode, the ZLUDA compiler simply is not an optimizing, SSA-based compiler. There are certain optimizations relevant to machine learning workloads that are beyond our reach without custom LLVM optimization passes.

That's a much better argumentation than "we did it because we are adults".

(except that it applies to Zluda, not necessarily this project)

I think Zig is trying to get rid of it as well, much harder to debug iirc.

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