Exactly, all the later languages that were made to replace C++ (Swift, Rust, Zig) all rely on LLVM, so it has become a much more important project than in the p

Exactly, all the later languages that were made to replace C++ (Swift, Rust, Zig) all rely on LLVM, so it has become a much more important project than in the past. (And I'll bet Google's new Carbon language will also rely on LLVM.) It's just that it's so hard and time-consuming to write a compiler backend with all the latest optimization techniques, and GCC's backend isn't as much as flexible than what LLVM brings to the table.