> > It was created as a research project exploring: "transparent, lifelong program analysis and transformation for arbitrary programs."[1] GCC and other compile

> > It was created as a research project exploring: "transparent, lifelong program analysis and transformation for arbitrary programs."[1] GCC and other compilers were not setup to do this. > gcc was in fact set up to explicitly not be able to do this. GCC was originally very difficult to integrate with so that non-free programs could not be built on top of it. However, the creation of LLVM does not reduce to: "GCC was difficult to work with so we made this." There had been many attempts to make "Universal Compiler IRs". These attempts had not gone well. LLVM instead chose to do something at a unique level of abstraction that wasn't good for everything but was very good for its particular niche. Once again, read the paper, LLVM really wasn't created as a reaction against GCC.