Didn't Zig "just" decide to permanently stay irrelevant for performance critical code by replacing LLVM by a yet to be written home grown optimiser and code generator? Don't get me wrong LLVM has lots of warts, but the a good multi architecture optimiser and code generator is a larger project than the frontend and standard library for any reasonable language.
No. They are turning llvm into an "optional dependency", or plugin, or call it what you want. Day to day/debug compilation will be done with their own compiler and if you want you can cut a release with llvm to get all the optimizations when you're done, or at any time really.
Zig won't ship with llvm as part of the standard download, but i imagine it will be easy to get zig+llvm working
