Ask HN: LLVM vs. C

• alumina

  10 153 4.6 Rust

  A general purpose programming language

  

You can go surprisingly far with C, though LLVM is probably a better long-term option for a serious compiler, because it's a tool made for the job (unless you target exotic and/or embedded platforms that don't have LLVM support - but that's fairly unlikely).

C is very easy to get started with if you don't already know LLVM. The downside is that once your compiler is reasonably complete, you may spend quite a bit of time working around quirks of C (e.g. int promotion is very annoying when you already have full type information, so your compiler either has to understand C semantics fairly well or defensively cast every subexpression).

I have a C backend in my compiler (https://github.com/alumina-lang/alumina) and it works really well, though the generated C is really ugly and assembly-like. With #line directives, you can also get source-level debugging (gdb/lldb) that just works out of the box.

There are a few goodies that LLVM gives you that you don't get with C, like coverage (https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SourceBasedCodeCoverage.html). It works when done through clang, but easily be made to track the original sources.

• llvm-cbe

  14 791 6.5 C++

  resurrected LLVM "C Backend", with improvements

  

So how does the LLVM C backend work then?

https://github.com/JuliaHubOSS/llvm-cbe

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