LLVM

Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with LLVM, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 17 complaints

Documentation for the API is so poor the commenter couldn't figure out how to use it2025-08-31
Users must manually cut loop bodies, remove branches, and rescale metrics to compare code2025-06-29
Unstable API forces projects to pin versions and struggle to build against it2024-11-26
Expected table formats are undocumented and confusing, with misleading error messages2023-12-13
Bug tracker registration is restricted, making it hard to report bugs2023-05-09
C API is gimped and lacks metadata support, forcing use of the C++ API2021-09-07
The word "register" refers to two opposed concepts, which is confusing2021-08-17
Hard to tell which cpp file belongs to which CMake file2020-10-28
Can only learn of cross-architecture failures after committing, waiting hours, then reverting2017-01-13
Steep learning curve, undocumented abstractions, and crashes make backend debugging very hard2017-01-06
Two download links lead to installers with different expected headers, leaving the user confused which to choose2016-03-09
Poorly documented, hard to make progress, and debugging pattern matcher errors is painful2015-08-04
Patterns that look valid fail with stack blowups or opaque internal errors, with unclear limits2015-02-02
Setting up LLVM on Windows is a pain; Windows language tooling is hard to configure2014-01-10
Found the LLVM library very hard to use2014-01-09
C API has little to no documentation, and tutorials are outdated2011-04-07
Had to read the source to work out how to disable dlsym behavior2010-10-15