QBE – Compiler Backend – 1.3

I love that there are compilers beside the big 2 with a simple API, and small enough codebase, that produce decent-enough code, but damn did I make an honest effort to crack the QBE source code, and it is just impenetrable, not only because the difficulty of the domain, but the code is just arcane.

It was one of the projects that made me realize what the arcane wizened sages of olden C were capable of - C is not as much a programming language with best practices as a template for one - and many competing ideas and interesting ways of coding have emerged over the ~40 years of C dominance (starting from the emergence of the language, to the early 2000s, around when for various reasons, OOP kinda 'won') - if one abandons all pretense of safety and comfort.

There's this project and MIR - both have the same mad science DNA, QBE being a bit more friendly and well documented, with MIR making faster code - boiling down mostly to the architectural decision that MIR does inlining while QBE does not.

Windows support is huge. One of the barriers to me considering QBE for a project in recent memory was that it had no story for proprietary OSes (Windows, MacOS), and whether I like it or not, those make up the overwhelming majority of desktop-like market share. (this is the same reason I find Hare, a language that builds with QBE, interesting but not practical for my own uses - targeting only Linux and the BSDs is a non-starter, even if I personally am a Linux-only guy)

I really want to like QBE, but declaration blocks like this make it feel like 1970s Unix code more than a modern hackable piece of software:

    int t, x, r, rf, rt, nr;
    bits rs;
    Ins *i, *i1;
    Mem *m;
    Ref *ra[4];

Nearly ideal. The only stopper for me is missing a way to add source level debugging info.

So will hare now support windows?

Related. Others?

QBE – Compiler Back End - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48059633 - May 2026 (28 comments*)

Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058644 - May 2026 (55 comments)

Qbecc – QBE based C compiler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45461195 - Oct 2025 (3 comments)

Let's write a peephole optimizer for QBE's ARM64 back end - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45099348 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)

QBE – Compiler Back End - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346320 - May 2024 (37 comments)

cproc – Small C11 compiler based on QBE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32466098 - Aug 2022 (1 comment)

QBE 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846433 - June 2022 (3 comments)

I wrote a peephole optimizer for QBE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30864448 - March 2022 (5 comments)

Cproc C Compiler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28242024 - Aug 2021 (45 comments)

Cproc – a C11 compiler using QBE as a back end - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273918 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)

QBE vs. LLVM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273907 - Dec 2020 (99 comments)

Show HN: QBE – a new compiler back end - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555527 - April 2016 (68 comments)

(* Normally a thread that recent with significant comments would count as a dupe (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but it didn't get that much frontpage time so I've made an exception.)

Is QBE intended for production use, or is it primarily a research/educational project?