I'm almost positive that LLVM provides both. You always target LLVM bytecode with your frontend, but then you can choose either to: - run the bytecode using t

I'm almost positive that LLVM provides both. You always target LLVM bytecode with your frontend, but then you can choose either to: - run the bytecode using the LLVM with or without JIT. - compile the LLVM bytecode into x86 bytecode. This is what clang does (afaik) and is a reasonably nice use case because you write a static language that targets LLVM bytecode and end with a fast program because LLVM will output optimized x86 binaries. However, I'm pretty sure that the efforts like unladen swallow attempt to use the LLVM's virtual machine in the hope that it will become very fast as they optimize it (especially the JIT part).