LLVM IR Gains Byte Type: Native Support for Raw Memory Operations

A Google Summer of Code 2025 project under the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure successfully added a new byte type to the LLVM IR, representing raw memory values. This enables native implementation of memory intrinsics like memcpy, memmove, and memcmp, fixes unsound transformations, and unlocks new optimizations, all with minimal performance overhead. The project addressed LLVM's longstanding lack of a type for representing raw memory, improving compiler correctness and optimization through pointer provenance tracking and precise poison bit representation. Clang's handling of C/C++ raw memory access types was also improved, along with fixes for several unsound optimizations.