cproc

>So one of the main problems you run into is that your elegant solution only works about 60-80% of the time. The rest of the time, you end up falling back onto near-unmaintainable, horribly inelegant kludges that end up having to exist This is generally true, though for small compiler backends they have the luxury to straight up refuse to support such use cases. Take QBE and Cranelift for example, the former lacks x87 support [1], the latter doesn't support varargs[2]; which means either of them support the full x86-64 ABI for C99. [1]https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc?tab=readme-ov-file#wh... [2]https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/1030

Michaelforney has also built croc [1], a qbe based C compiler. Really impressive! [1]: https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc

there has recently been a revival of interest in simple c (or c-like) compilers, e.g. https://c9x.me/compile/ (c frontend: https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc) https://github.com/sysprog21/shecc (this fundamentally targets risc-like architectures, but is very clearly written). perhaps eventually a simple well-defined semantics will emerge (i think projects like the above already support more of a regehr-style c rather than iso).

cproc: a C11 compiler *) https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc *) programming language used for the compiler: C *) using QBE as a backend - https://c9x.me/compile/

Related: Source on GitHub: https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc QBE Compiler back-end: https://c9x.me/compile/ >"QBE is compiler backend that aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code."

I'd be more optimistic. The cproc C compiler has only a very small team but it supports enough of the C language to compile GCC 4.7. https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc

Perhaps the lightweight qbe compiler backend. [0] There's a C frontend for qbe called cproc. [1][2] See also this talk [3] which discusses the relative ease of porting qbe, at 11:14. [0] https://c9x.me/compile/ [1] https://sr.ht/~mcf/cproc/ [2] Official GitHub mirror: https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc [3] https://spacepub.space/w/pjgvVL74xtFwqnaKuoCXZj?start=11m14s

A word of warning for those wondering: this is not for Intel syntax, despite referencing the Intel doc. Minias can assemble itself ...but it's written in C and uses a parser generator? IMHO it feels a bit backwards --- and perhaps even a bit cheating if you're doing this for a "bootstrap pilgrimage" --- to write a lower-level tool in a higher-level language. On the other hand, the same author also links to a C compiler in C, without a parser generator: https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc

This one is fantastic: https://github.com/michaelforney/cproc