The latest version of the LLVM 3.5 compiler infrastructure, version 3.5, is now available for download as it faces potential competition from the up-and-coming version 5 of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection). It's also staring down the prospect of an alternate version hardened against errors and memory leaks by way of formal mathematical proofs.
LLVM isn't a compiler for a given language, but rather a framework that can be used to generate object code from any kind of source code. The project can target a broad variety of instruction sets, so it's a powerful way to develop compilers for a given language that span hardware types. Version 3.5's new features mostly target the ARM back end and the way code is emitted for MIPS and AArch64 processor architectures, but some languages have also recently added LLVM support. LDC, for example, uses LLVM to compile the D language.
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