alt Hacker NewsI 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];
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I tried to look at the QBE code years ago while I was writing my own SSA code. I got approximately nowhere because I can't read code like that. Turns out that reading the SSA papers and writing the code was a lot easier than reading QBE.
It is hard for me to fully trust a compiler backend that isn't self hosted. There is a discipline that self hosting imposes that would both improve the quality of their ir as well as the backend itself. A self hosted backend can always be updated to have performance meeting or exceeding the best that llvm or any other backend can offer.
Yeah that looks like they've prioritised code golfing a bit too much over code quality. Also using AT&T assembly syntax shows poor taste. Definitely 80s themed software.
Yeah, I tried my hand at adding amd64_win support to QBE, but going through the very dense code was a slog. I kept refactoring and commenting it just to make heads or tails of it, but ultimately realized I would never be able to minify it back to something upstreamable. I applaud Scott Graham's perseverance and tenacity.