It is the social problem of having people show up and grind maintenance work to just make it compile. Which means other questions are left untouched. It is approximately zero sum.

I mean, fundamentally, keeping a C++ abi backwards compatible is a horror story. It like, just doesn't work, for non-trivial projects. So LLVM breaks all the time.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/devdocs/llvm/

Julia got like 12 custom LLVM passes. They are deep into the LLVM. And they seems to include C++ headers from the LLVM project, not using the C api.

In practice you'd want insider maintainers in the LLVM project to guard your dependency like it would have been an in tree front-end.

LLVMs API is the c++ one. The C one while more stable also doesn't support everything. Keeping up with LLVM is annoying but it's not the source of bugs or anything of the sort. PS(it's not actually stable. Because if the c++ code it calls is removed it just gets removed from the C one)

I say this as one of the devs that usually do the work of keeping up the latest LLVM.

Ye well, I am just guessing as an outsider so I guess I'll have to fold.