> If you don't know, the general structure is LLVM is to have a frontend and a backend. The frontend translates whatever your language is into LLVM-IR (intermed

> If you don't know, the general structure is LLVM is to have a frontend and a backend. The frontend translates whatever your language is into LLVM-IR (intermediate representation), a sort of abstract assembly language. This isn't tied to any particular architecture (eg IIRC there are infinite registers in LLVM-IR). The backend translates that to a particular architecture. This is good because it's easier to get a compiler off the ground but gcc's performance is still second-to-none. Virtually every modern compiler is implemented using this approach - including GCC. GCC also used to be quite a lot slower than clang, but just like with error messsages, the GCC people have put a lot of work into it.