{"slug": "llvm", "name": "LLVM", "category": "dev-libs", "category_name": "Libraries and frameworks", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 7, "warners": 2, "score": 2.14, "rising": 1.35, "first": "2026-01-12", "latest": "2026-10-15", "why": "GCC and LLVM having won the compiler wars and being extremely high quality", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 1, "compare": 0, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "GCC and LLVM having won the compiler wars and being extremely high quality", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/llvm/llvm-project", "official_url": "https://llvm.org", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["LLVM"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 795257362, "item_id": 49703585, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703585", "by": "jcastro", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use `lima` and `llvm` every day with brew.", "excerpt": "I use `lima` and `llvm` every day with brew. It works great there's no reason to use distro specific tooling when you can use what everyone else is using.", "context": "", "use_case": "compiler toolchain", "switched_from": "", "story": "Homebrew 7.0.0"}, {"id": 786289264, "item_id": 49143079, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143079", "by": "lrvick", "date": "2026-08-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use quite a few of their llvm patches and are very thankful for their work", "excerpt": "While we are building for a dramatically different threat model, we use quite a few of their llvm patches and are very thankful for their work, and alpine making llvm/musl a viable option for us.", "context": "builds a distro with a different threat model", "use_case": "toolchain", "switched_from": "", "story": "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"}, {"id": 785986465, "item_id": 49124154, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124154", "by": "lanstin", "date": "2026-07-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GCC and LLVM having won the compiler wars and being extremely high quality", "excerpt": "I believe you are underestimating the value of GCC and LLVM having won the compiler wars and being extremely high quality, and of Linux having won the OS wars, being extremely high quality. I use GenAI every day, but the quality is still proportional to the amount of my time - there is a multiplier for quantity of my amount but the 9s approaching 1 quality is not logarithmically different - the effort to fix one big ", "context": "", "use_case": "compiler", "switched_from": "", "story": "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"}, {"id": 745506880, "item_id": 46594180, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594180", "by": "hoyhoy", "date": "2026-01-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love LLVM though.", "excerpt": "I asked the guy working on compiler-rt to change one boolean so the LLVM 18 build would work on macOS, and he locked the whole issue down as \"heated\" and it's still not fixed four years later. I love LLVM though. clang-tidy, ASAN, UBSAN, LSAN, MSAN, and TSAN are AMAZING. If you are coding C and C++ and NOT using clang-tidy, you are doing it wrong. My biggest problem with LLVM rn is that -fbounds-safety is only availa", "context": "C/C++ developer on macOS and Linux", "use_case": "C/C++ toolchain", "switched_from": "", "story": "LLVM: The Bad Parts"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 801626272, "item_id": 50101642, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101642", "by": "imtringued", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "LLVM is a classic compiler backend optimized for mutable aliasing, which means it is not that great at producing code for VLIW architectures.", "excerpt": ">but now we can say it gave the false sense of safety Ok, but that perspective is only valid from Rust++ users who get to mog both Rust and C users. It's not a valid perspective from C users. Also, your position against Rust is really strange to me, because I love the lack of mutable aliasing. If you think it is a punishment for the programmer you're stuck in a programming model from the 70s. Rust's model is theoreti", "context": "", "use_case": "compiler backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"}, {"id": 748351088, "item_id": 46771943, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771943", "by": "fooker", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "There was a notorious LLVM pass that had more bugs than lines of code", "excerpt": "> the specification of the language Guess what language the specification is written in (if it exists at all) ? It's usually natural language, and even then, compilers deviate from the specification all the time, and the specification has bugs. Formal specifications are a thing, but the science is nowhere mature enough to dictate what compilers do. > unless it has a bug Compilers are not magic, the way it follows spe", "context": "compiler developer", "use_case": "compiler infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Draig, a Welsh Programming Language"}]}], "who": [{"by": "lrvick", "context": "builds a distro with a different threat model", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143079", "date": "2026-08-02"}, {"by": "tester756", "context": "compiler engineer, formerly C# dev", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48796700", "date": "2026-07-05"}, {"by": "hoyhoy", "context": "C/C++ developer on macOS and Linux", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594180", "date": "2026-01-12"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["compiler backend", "compiler toolchain", "toolchain", "compiler", "compiler infrastructure", "c/c++ toolchain"], "compared": [], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069499", "title": "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49681545", "title": "Homebrew 7.0.0", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49133889", "title": "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108685", "title": "GCC steering committee announces AI policy", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793454", "title": "Introduction to Compilers and Language Design", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46721421", "title": "Draig, a Welsh Programming Language", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {"warn": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 801626272, "item_id": 50101642, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101642", "by": "imtringued", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "LLVM is a classic compiler backend optimized for mutable aliasing, which means it is not that great at producing code for VLIW architectures.", "excerpt": ">but now we can say it gave the false sense of safety Ok, but that perspective is only valid from Rust++ users who get to mog both Rust and C users. It's not a valid perspective from C users. Also, your position against Rust is really strange to me, because I love the lack of mutable aliasing. If you think it is a punishment for the programmer you're stuck in a programming model from the 70s. Rust's model is theoreti", "context": "", "use_case": "compiler backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"}, {"id": 795257362, "item_id": 49703585, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703585", "by": "jcastro", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use `lima` and `llvm` every day with brew.", "excerpt": "I use `lima` and `llvm` every day with brew. It works great there's no reason to use distro specific tooling when you can use what everyone else is using.", "context": "", "use_case": "compiler toolchain", "switched_from": "", "story": "Homebrew 7.0.0"}, {"id": 786289264, "item_id": 49143079, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143079", "by": "lrvick", "date": "2026-08-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use quite a few of their llvm patches and are very thankful for their work", "excerpt": "While we are building for a dramatically different threat model, we use quite a few of their llvm patches and are very thankful for their work, and alpine making llvm/musl a viable option for us.", "context": "builds a distro with a different threat model", "use_case": "toolchain", "switched_from": "", "story": "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"}, {"id": 785986465, "item_id": 49124154, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124154", "by": "lanstin", "date": "2026-07-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GCC and LLVM having won the compiler wars and being extremely high quality", "excerpt": "I believe you are underestimating the value of GCC and LLVM having won the compiler wars and being extremely high quality, and of Linux having won the OS wars, being extremely high quality. I use GenAI every day, but the quality is still proportional to the amount of my time - there is a multiplier for quantity of my amount but the 9s approaching 1 quality is not logarithmically different - the effort to fix one big ", "context": "", "use_case": "compiler", "switched_from": "", "story": "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"}, {"id": 780747200, "item_id": 48796700, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48796700", "by": "tester756", "date": "2026-07-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "custom-lang to LLVM IR to webassembly (via LLVM) compiler", "excerpt": "I've been working full time for like 3 yrs as C# dev + doing higher edu at weekends at the same time and I was about to decide thesis topic. I've been searching for something challenging and found some very random post on programming forums about how compilers are hard etc and decided to give it a try. I had kind of advantage that I accidentally had some significant amount of experience with handwritten parsers (at f", "context": "compiler engineer, formerly C# dev", "use_case": "compiler backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Introduction to Compilers and Language Design"}, {"id": 748351088, "item_id": 46771943, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771943", "by": "fooker", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "There was a notorious LLVM pass that had more bugs than lines of code", "excerpt": "> the specification of the language Guess what language the specification is written in (if it exists at all) ? It's usually natural language, and even then, compilers deviate from the specification all the time, and the specification has bugs. Formal specifications are a thing, but the science is nowhere mature enough to dictate what compilers do. > unless it has a bug Compilers are not magic, the way it follows spe", "context": "compiler developer", "use_case": "compiler infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Draig, a Welsh Programming Language"}, {"id": 745506880, "item_id": 46594180, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594180", "by": "hoyhoy", "date": "2026-01-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love LLVM though.", "excerpt": "I asked the guy working on compiler-rt to change one boolean so the LLVM 18 build would work on macOS, and he locked the whole issue down as \"heated\" and it's still not fixed four years later. I love LLVM though. clang-tidy, ASAN, UBSAN, LSAN, MSAN, and TSAN are AMAZING. If you are coding C and C++ and NOT using clang-tidy, you are doing it wrong. My biggest problem with LLVM rn is that -fbounds-safety is only availa", "context": "C/C++ developer on macOS and Linux", "use_case": "C/C++ toolchain", "switched_from": "", "story": "LLVM: The Bad Parts"}]}