LLVM vs JVM

Compile time:

• JVM: compiles source code (e.g. Java / Kotlin / Scala) to bytecode;
• LLVM:
  • front-end (e.g. Clang / Flang) compiles source code to IR (intermediate representation, IR was designed from the beginning to be a portable assembly.)
  • back-end turns IR into a native binary executable.

Runtime:

• JVM: garbage collection, access to resources, etc. JVM is an interpreter for Java bytecode, It has to be running during program execution. (Bigger size and higher overhead).
• LLVM: not needed during runtime (since it generates architecture specific executables in advance)

Just-in-time and Ahead-of-time

As discussed above, LLVM is primarily ahead-of-time, JVM is primarily just-in-time.

LLVM also supports just-in-time compiling (based on the generated IR), since in some cases code needs to be generated on the fly, e.g. when using REPL in Julia. (lli: directly executes programs in LLVM bitcode format. It takes a program in LLVM bitcode format and executes it using a just-in-time compiler or an interpreter.)

GraalVM can compile JAVA application ahead-of-time to native binaries.

register-based vs stack-based

• LLVM: low level, register-based virtual machine. It is designed to abstract the underlying hardware and draw a clean line between a compiler back-end (machine code generation) and front-end (parsing, etc.).
• JVM: higher level, stack-based virtual machine (rather than loading values into registers, JVM bytecode loads values onto a stack and computes values from there).

Cross Language

Because of IR and bytecode, both LLVM and JVM can support multiple languages.

• LLVM: C, C++, Rust, Swift, Fortran, Kotlin/Native, etc.
• JVM: Java, Kotlin/JVM, Scala, Groovy, Closure, etc.
  • GraalVM: Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, R, WASM, etc.

LLVM provide primitives for common programming languages features. E.g. functions, global variables, coroutines and C foreign-function interfaces. LLVM has many of these as standard elements in its IR. The split of front-end and backend-end frees high-level language compilers from having to target every platform (they only need to emit LLVM intermediate representation).

LLVM front-ends:

• Clang: for C family of languages, e.g. C, C++, Objective-C
• Flang: for Fortran, added in LLVM 13

Implementation

• LLVM itself is written in C++; it provides C and C++ APIs.
• OpenSDK is written in C++.
• GraalVM is written in Java.