Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1080519/

QBE, a compact compiler backend developed by Quentin Carbonneaux, is a
lightweight alternative to larger compiler backends such as LLVM and GCC.
Designed to be small enough for a single developer to understand, QBE uses a

static single-assignment (SSA) intermediate representation (IR), supports the C ABI,
and serves as the backend for projects such as Hare and
the cproc C11 compiler. Frontends
emit the textual form of QBE’s IR directly; QBE then takes care of register allocation,
optimization, and native-code generation, producing assembly for the target
architecture.