LLVM doesn't have to be great for its existence to make PL dev a lot easier. Codegen used to be a real pain.
replyThe interesting part to me was always that he didn't justify Jai very much. He didn't assert that anybody else would want to use it, or that it would be universally better than C++. His claim was that he didn't need to: building a language is now so quick that he can make a language just for him, just because he feels like it. Everybody can have their own language frontend.
In fact reading between the lines of that video a bit, I think he might believe that general-purpose languages are poorly suited to his use because they're focused on solving other people's problems. But that's just me extrapolating.
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