LLVM and the future of optimization

Question

I realize that LLVM has a long way to go, but theoretically, can the optimizations that are in GCC/ICC/etc. for individual languages be applied to LLVM byte code? If so, does t

Answer 1

LLVM has made a far way to be a promising alternative to GCC (it even succeeds in compiling the Linux kernel, with some patches). It is also in many cases faster than GCC (the compiler and the generated executables) and has a structure which makes it quite easy to write frontends for arbitrary languages.

But to allow extensive optimizations also the frontend is equally important since it knows much more details about the program being compiled. Things the LLVM stack cannot easily find out. Therefore to generate efficient programs also the frontend has to optimize the code.