You're criticism is an apples vs. oranges strawman. LLVM IR and libraries provide powerful plumbing. It's not meant to be a turn-key or cookie-cutter solution, or inherently memory-safe VM or compiler generator. It's also not formally verified and written in C++, which adds project configuration complexity and C++ pitfalls. It's possible to plug in a custom GC using their strategy model their way, or manage GC yourself like Pony does because it's built around ORCA.