For Google, sure. Everybody working with the in-house hardware could do so without hunting for a version of the internal patch&#x2F;fork. Using the fork would surely be easy enough when directly using LLVM, but the deeper it is hidden within a dependency tree, the more friction it adds to whatever the user at the root of that tree is doing.<p>Everybody else pays a small &quot;maintenance tax&quot; when working on the codebase or relying on work being done on that codebase.<p>Being by no means a compiler expert I do suspect however, that this &quot;tax&quot; is tiny and likely to be dwarfed by other contributions from Google, so letting them solve distribution of their private backend by piggybacking on the public release is most likely the right course of action.