Our great sponsors
-
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
> 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