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Comment by AlexanderDhoore | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how few people there are (around me) that know about LLVM. When Java, PHP or C# gets new features things go crazy. But LLVM is like this secret weapon that Apple (and others) have. Chugging along, getting more powerful, not asking for attention.

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LLVM has lots of nice features, but they are mainly interesting to C, C++ and Objective-C developers on desktop UNIX systems.

So it tends to be ignored by the folks you mentioned.

An interesting consequence of LLVM's popularity is that compiler researchers are moving away from JVM and .NET implementations to LLVM for their work.

I understand the perf hit on the JVM can be terrible for some languages (less so for CLR), but it certainly is nice to immediately gain a massive set of libraries, as well as benefiting from the whole ecosystem of tooling.

As I understand, LLVM just provides the codegen part, right? (Mono has an LLVM option for codegen.)

Mono does indeed have an LLVM backend. I have no idea if it is upto date with Mono, or LLVM. I'd love to know why one choose a difference compiler / VM. A fair comparison.

It's pretty up to date. Xamarin (the company behind Mono) uses the LLVM-backend to create native C# applications to run on iOS (as iOS doesn't allow for JIT compilation).

Although I don't necessarily agree, many consider the "native" (C-ABI) tools and libraries to be sufficient.

On one hand, you have web developers. On the other hand, you have compiler engineers. The difference in communities is quite stark.

And in the middle you have those superstars JavaScript JIT engine developers that browser makers fight over.

They are compiler engineers as well.

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