cparser VS xcc

> QBE is a new optimizing backend much simpler than LLVM; cproc and cparser are two of the C compilers that target it, in addition to its own minic.

I thought cparser targeted libFirm. That's what their GitHub page says [0].

"It acts as a frontend to the libFirm intermediate representation library."

> We really need a production quality open source C compiler that is actually written in C.

I honestly think cproc or cparser are almost there already. For cproc, you just need to improve the quality of code optimization; it's really QBE you'd need to change. For example, you could change unnecessary multiplications by powers of 2 into left shifts, improve instruction selection so that subtraction is always something like "sub rax, rdi" and not "neg rdi / add rax, rdi" [1]).

For cparser, I notice slightly higher quality codegen; libFirm just needs more architecture support (e.g. AMD64 support appears to work for me, but it's labeled as experimental).

[0]: https://github.com/libfirm/cparser

[1]: I'm pretty sure this is the line of code that generates it, too: https://c9x.me/git/qbe.git/tree/amd64/emit.c#n418

My own C compiler is designed for x86-64 and outputs ELF64 binary. My plan was that if I could output code that could run on x86-64, I could run it on my home computer, and I would be able to do this for the next 10 years. However, with the emergence of various processors, it seems that x86 may not remain the mainstream.