New languages, and improvements on existing ones, are mushrooming throughout the develoment landscape. Mozilla’s Rust, Apple’s Swift, Jetbrains’s Kotlin, and many other languages provide developers with a new range of choices for speed, safety, convenience, portability, and power.
Why now? One big reason is new tools for building languages—specifically, compilers. And chief among them is LLVM (Low-Level Virtual Machine), an open source project originally developed by Swift language creator Chris Lattner as a research project at the University of Illinois.