No, not really. LLVM is not a C compiler, it consumes an intermediate representation. Clang is the C compiler which produces LLVM IR. Likewise, GCC contains a

No, not really. LLVM is not a C compiler, it consumes an intermediate representation. Clang is the C compiler which produces LLVM IR. Likewise, GCC contains a C compiler but the machine specific parts like the codegen take an intermediate representation (GCC has several) as input. Almost no compilers out there compile directly from C to machine code, there is one or more intermediate forms in between. C is not a good input language for an optimizing compiler. It's a good and entirely valid comparison. It's the backend codegen that is being compared, the language frontend does not really play a part in it.