Comment by ahartmetz
21 hours ago
LLVM was supposed to be a virtual machine initially, hence the (original) name: Low-level virtual machine. The direction that it took, and especially the development of Clang: that was at least partially because of GCC's intentional anti-modularity.
LLVM was never meant to be a virtual machine, which is the reason why its name was ultimately changed. (It's closer to an instantiation of the C abstract machine, which is where the "virtual machine" came from.)
AFAIK, being a flexible JIT compiler (for C-like languages, not Java) was a large part of the idea. The pivot to static compilation only happened "accidentally" in the first few years until the by then pretty broken JIT part was officially removed. Correct me if I'm wrong.