I've been following Philip Reames' blog, it's good to see LLVM get some serious precise GC love.
Reading the job advert, I would have to wonder if they want to avoid an all in, 100% bet on the Hotspot JVM, not to mention strict JVMs in general. I wouldn't be surprised if they have the best concentration of knowledge on Hotspot in the world, including Oracle, might be getting a bit tired of it, and certainly would know the limitations of its code base by now.
I think that they might just want to profit from all the love going into LLVM. Currenlty hotspot has costum optimization and if you have a product based on it you have to maintain this and improve it. If you manage to creat a fast powerful LLVM based JVM you can profit from the other work going into that space and maybe distance yourself from the orcale standard.
However, currently not that many JIT are LLVM based so it seams that it needs some love to get this to working well. Both for GC and compilation speed. Thats at least my guess.
Reading the job advert, I would have to wonder if they want to avoid an all in, 100% bet on the Hotspot JVM, not to mention strict JVMs in general. I wouldn't be surprised if they have the best concentration of knowledge on Hotspot in the world, including Oracle, might be getting a bit tired of it, and certainly would know the limitations of its code base by now.