A comment on the youtube video of richard's newest talk got me thinking...
Starting comment was:
> Wants a fast compiler
> Uses LLVM
I added some clarification in a reply and then they asked about QBE.
QBE seems quite promising in general to me. It "aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code."
This raised the general question for me, should languages have 3 compiler backends in the current ecosystem?
The backends would be:
Note, you could add a 4 here as well, LLVM + LTO + PGO + any other tools.
And maybe this grouping isn't the right tradeoff, but I know plenty of projects where I can use dev cause the runtime is too slow, but I also hate waiting for the compile time of llvm.
I guess you could say that projects like go only have the equivalent of 2 and are quite successful.
I think D is in a similar boat.
The big difference being they home built their own optimized but not crazily solution instead of using something like QBE or cranelift.
Last updated: Jul 06 2025 at 12:14 UTC