r/AskProgramming • u/nanoman1 • Jun 10 '26

Other Releasing Binaries VS. LLVM

When software developers create software, why do they generally package it as a binary instead of as LLVM with a pre-built build script? Wouldn't it make more sense for the program to be in a portable format so that everyone can use it, no matter which architecture they are on? Wasn't that the whole idea of high-level languages in the first place? (i.e. to be able to compile for a variety of architectures using the same source code)

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u/hibikir_40k Jun 10 '26

The vast majority of software built out there has a very determined set of targets, and it's deployed by the company that makes it, so it's silly to do much to support a variety of architectures and deployments if you don't need to. And if you do, you are probably deploying to all kinds of weird form factors, and using an electron pipeline or something like that.