LLVM started out as a research project at the University of Illinois, but Apple hired the lead developer in 2005 and put a ton of work into making it good enough to replace GCC. Apple also originally wrote Clang, LLVM's C/C++/Objective-C frontend, though Rust doesn't directly rely on this part.
Calling it "Apple's" threw me off too, but it's not entirely misleading because without Apple, it might not have become a production-ready compiler. At the least, I would say Apple did more than "just use it".
Calling it "Apple's" threw me off too, but it's not entirely misleading because without Apple, it might not have become a production-ready compiler. At the least, I would say Apple did more than "just use it".