LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies, which can be used to develop a front end for any programming language and a back end for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes.

LLVM is written in C++ and is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and "idle-time" optimization. Originally implemented for C and C++, the language-agnostic design of LLVM has since spawned a wide variety of front ends: languages with compilers that use LLVM include ActionScript, Ada, C#, Common Lisp, PicoLisp, Crystal, CUDA, D, Delphi, Dylan, Forth, Fortran, Free Basic, Free Pascal, Graphical G, Halide, Haskell, Java bytecode, Julia, Kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, OpenCL, PostgreSQL's SQL and PLpgSQL, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift, XC, Xojo and Zig.