What will the LLVM compiler project bring to the table?

I have heard a lot about LLVM an开发者_StackOverflow中文版d I was wondering what improvements it will bring to the table.

LLVM is a newer compiler back-end. It is currently reported to compile faster than gcc, and do more optimizations across/between source files (depends on the exact nature of the source being benchmarked, of course). LLVM also clearly defines a high-level interface between the compiler front-end and back-end, possibly making it more portable for language research and JIT enbedding, etc.

But one important possible "improvement" may be that a few corporations that are adverse to contributing to a GPL'd code base (for whatever reasons) may contribute new compiler optimizations and back-end code to LLVM instead (since it is open source, but not GPL).