I find that a very bold move, how will they reivent the wheel on the man-years of optimization work went into LLVM to their own compiler infrastructure?
All that will still be available just not in main zig repo. Someone may have asked same question about LLVM when GNU compiler exist.
as a comment about a particular project and its goals and timelines, this is fine. as a general statement that we should never revisit things its pretty offensive. llvm makes a lot of assumptions about the structure of your code and the way its manipulated. if I were working on a language today I would try my best to avoid it. the back ends are where most of the value is and why I might be tempted to use it.
we should really happy that language evolution has started again. language monoculture was really dreary and unproductive.
20 years ago you would be called insane for throwing away all the man-years of optimization baked into oracle, and I guess postgres or mysql if you were being low rent. and look where we are today, thousands of people can build databases.
They're just removing the obligate dependency. I'm pretty sure they will keep it around as a first-class supported backend target for compilation.