Interesting that on page 6 of this book, it talks about the same idea as LLVM (as I understand it): "There are advantages and disadvantages to an intermediate-

Interesting that on page 6 of this book, it talks about the same idea as LLVM (as I understand it): "There are advantages and disadvantages to an intermediate-language approach to compiler writing[...] Intermediate languages give you flexibility as well. A single lexical-analyzer/parser front end can be used to generate code for several different machines by providing different back ends that translate a common intermediate language to a machine-specific assembly language. Conversely, you can write several front ends that parse several different high-level languages, but which all output the same intermediate language. This way, compilers for several languages can share a single optimizer and back end."