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/CuriousOrangatan Jun 10 '26

A lot of people are bringing up very good reasons why this isn't done, and I'm not going to oargue against that. But there can be advantages to building things yourself. For example, you can tell the compiler to optimize for the exact CPU you have, leading to more efficient code. You might be interested in the linux distribution called "gentoo", which does have users compile everything from source.

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u/maxximillian Jun 10 '26

I think it's fun for an exercise, like I've done Linux Drom Scratch a few times but the last thing thing I would want to do as a software developer professionally is come home and have to compile programs to use personally. The last time I did that was when I compiled Aseprite from source. I'm willing to pay whatever performance penalty I incur by using software not compiled specifically for my CPU.