Re:Intel releases the last Itanium chip, the 9700
by trsohmers on Saturday May 13, 2017 @03:00PM
(#14332423)
LLVM is much more compartimentalized, so we can make changes to the backend without touching/breaking other parts. The GCC loader was miles ahead of the LLVM loader up until the past few releases, and we were originally using a modified version of the GCC loader before switching.
LLVM also has a bunch of awesome projects like Poly for polyhedral compilation that we are able to use that don't exist at all for GCC, or are very difficult to integrate. LLVMs lego block like architecture (it was originally designed as a tool to help build toolchains) plus things like Tablegen enabled our single "real" software engineer/CTO to do initial bring up of a backend in under a month.
No, porting GCC to a new architecture is not a big deal. The really complex part is the ABI, and what I have heard from former GCC developers is that it's as much of a mess in LLVM, because it's simply a messy domain.