The whole "LLVM has made programming langs easy" is a joke, unless your language is just a syntax wrapper over C-like functionality (so those saying such things are kind of telling on themselves).

Having really sophisticated memory management, type checking, semantics, safety guarantees, etc. is not at all trivial. The only part that has gotten easier is syntax => AST => machine code, but that is probably 10% of a PL if you want it to do something people will actually use.

Of course Jai "is fast" (meaning it has none of those things), so obviously LLVM is 90% of the work (just translating AST into LLVM calls). Yes, you can do this with AI in an afternoon, no its not useful to anyone. The real work of making a usable, interesting, useful language is not diminished, and it has little to do with the syntax => AST => LLVM part of the compiler.

Said another way, no one is choosing C, C++, Python, or Java because they are "easy ways to get generate machine code". They choose them because they have: superior semantics (design, memory management, portability etc), 3rd party libraries, frameworks, debuggers, ecosystem, documentation, support, standard library, etc.

> that is probably 10% of a PL if you want it to do something people will actually use

I think this is really understating the challenge of generating machine code that is competitive in terms of size, performance, etc. with state-of-the-art compilers. I'll be the first to agree that it's far from the only (or even the biggest) difficulty in PL, but it remains a huge chunk of engineering work. The interesting part of this experiment is how much of that work, as a percentage of the work of building a programming language, is now given to you for free, for a language that is indeed mostly ‘just a syntax wrapper over C-like functionality’.

(Of course, a big part of ‘people will actually use’ is nothing to do with the language at all, but the next twenty years of building an ecosystem and community buy-in.)