Comment by Pet_Ant

> There is quite a lot of effort in making a decent LLVM backend, and these older systems tend to have relatively few maintainers

Well, it also takes effort to be held back with outdated tools. Also, the LLVM backend doesn't have to be top-notch, just runnable. If they want to run legacy hardware they should be okay with running a legacy or taking the performance hit of a weaker LLVM back-end.

Realistically

At version 16[1], LLVM supports: * IA-32 * x86-64 * ARM * Qualcomm Hexagon * LoongArch * M68K * MIPS * PowerPC * SPARC * z/Architecture * XCore * others

in the past it had support for Cell and Alpha, but I'm sure that the old code could be revived if needed, so how many users are effected here? Lets not forget the Linux dropped Itanium support and I'm sure someone is still running that somewhere.

Looking through this list [2], what I see missing is Elbrus, PA-RISC, OpenRisc, and SuperH. So pretty niche stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#Backends

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux-supported_comput...