I don't know this world well (I know what llvm is) but - does anyone know why this was made as a fork vs. contributing to llvm? I suppose it's harder to contribute code to the real llvm..?

Thanks

LLVM has very high quality standards in my experience. Much higher than I've ever had even at work. It might be a challenge to get this upstreamed.

LLVM is also very modular which makes it easy to maintain forks for a specific backend that don't touch core functionality.

Pretty sure that the prospects of successfully pitching the LLVM upstream to include a 6502 (or any 8/16-bit arch) backend are only slightly better than a snowball’s chances in hell.