Oh yeah, it’s actually pretty extensive and expressive. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff it’s worth checking out the IR language reference a bit. Apparently you can even specify the specific garbage collection strategy on a per-function basis if you want to. They do however specify the following: “Note that LLVM itself does not contain a garbage collector, this functionality is restricted to generating machine code which can interoperate with a collector provided externally” (source: llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#garbage-collector-stra… )

If you’re interested in this stuff it’s definitely fun to work through a part of that language reference document. It’s pretty approachable. After going through the first few chapters I had some fun writing some IR manually for some toy programs.