That's obviously a common misconception given the name -- LLVM was meant to be a VM early in its life, but never was, and isn't now. It's clarified in the first sentence of a home page - https://llvm.org/
It's basically a bunch of C++ libraries that implements an IR that changes over time, which help you write compilers.
Curiously, I think a decade or more ago there was a project at Google targeting the same space as WASM which made this mistake. They thought LLVM was a virtual machine! That was PNaCl or something.
I guess it's a little like LuaJIT freezing Lua at Lua 5.1 -- Lua was never a standard, but for the purposes of re-implementation, a specific version of it can be frozen. (But there are obvious problems with that approach, namely that the re-implementers don't know about all the bugs they're also freezing in time.)
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I have raised some eyebrows at the "compromises" of WASM, but the once thing that you can't doubt is that it is in fact a virtual machine !!!
I watched a talk on the WASM GC, and the creators were up front about the compromises (e.g. you will need runtime casts at first, with the measured overhead being reasonable), which gives me more confidence in it:
That's obviously a common misconception given the name -- LLVM was meant to be a VM early in its life, but never was, and isn't now. It's clarified in the first sentence of a home page - https://llvm.org/
It's basically a bunch of C++ libraries that implements an IR that changes over time, which help you write compilers.
Curiously, I think a decade or more ago there was a project at Google targeting the same space as WASM which made this mistake. They thought LLVM was a virtual machine! That was PNaCl or something.
I guess it's a little like LuaJIT freezing Lua at Lua 5.1 -- Lua was never a standard, but for the purposes of re-implementation, a specific version of it can be frozen. (But there are obvious problems with that approach, namely that the re-implementers don't know about all the bugs they're also freezing in time.)
---
I have raised some eyebrows at the "compromises" of WASM, but the once thing that you can't doubt is that it is in fact a virtual machine !!!
I watched a talk on the WASM GC, and the creators were up front about the compromises (e.g. you will need runtime casts at first, with the measured overhead being reasonable), which gives me more confidence in it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/17crk...