Chalst: Certainly he could target Clojure at LLVM; he'd just have to cook up a big elaborate runtime to replace all the runtime services the JVM is providing for him now. LLVM gives you pretty much nothing runtime-y. At best it is going to give, say, GC hooks or profiler hooks, or stack-management hooks to an unwinder library; in general it's runtime library is totally minimal. This is not a criticism: LLVM is great, it's just not a runtime system. It's a code generator / compiler backend.
What he wrote was this:
I’d like to pick my VM for its security, footprint, handling of parallelism and messaging, and run-time appropriateness. This would let me choose Lisp, Haskell, Python or C++, depending on the skillset of engineers available to me; and the JVM, .NET platform, or LLVM, depending on how I meant the code to be used.
To me this shows a pretty broad misunderstanding of the "VM" suffix shared by JVM and LLVM. They're different layers in the language implementation stack. There is no run-time component to LLVM to speak of; nothing on the scale of the services offered by a JVM. No "parallelism and messaging" system, no verifier, no security system, no reflection services, no dynamic loading services beyond the OS loader, no adaptive inlining or specializing by the JIT as the program's running, no complete GC, etc. etc. I'm not particularly keen on the JVMs flavours of all these services, but they're nontrivial. If you're writing a language that wants any of that stuff, and you want to "target LLVM", you're going to be writing a lot more of your own runtime services. Even getting GC working in an LLVM-targeted language involves nontrivial user-written parts.
About your example: GCJ does not compile Java "to the GCC runtime". The GCC runtime is roughly "libgcc and libc". GCJ compiles using GCC's infrastructure, sure, but its runtime library is quite substantial on its own.
(Appropriately enough, a moment of searching turns up the fact that there is also an LLVM sub-project to provide the JVM and .NET runtime services on top of LLVM. Heh.)