The article was talking about the Bitcode design in LLVM, not the plugin situation. Yes, gcc considered making plugins hard a feature, but as for a design that

The article was talking about the Bitcode design in LLVM, not the plugin situation. Yes, gcc considered making plugins hard a feature, but as for a design that separates the frontend and backend in order to make each more modular, then gcc in fact does have such a thing, gimple, https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/GIMPLE.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/GIMPLE.html I'm far from an expert, but from what I've seen and heard, gimple is pretty good for what it does. In other words, the author of the article is wrong to say that LLVM learned from a painful lesson in this area.