Comment by contificate

On the topic of QBE, I've always felt that someone aiming to do the same scope of project ought to make their IR a syntactic subset of LLVM IR. If you do that, your test suite can involve invoking LLVM for a comparison.

As for QBE itself, many of the core transformations are fairly standard, which makes it somewhat more approachable for me (e.g. Cooper et al's dominance algorithm, Rideau et al's parallel moves algorithm, etc.). Of course, this doesn't negate the fact that it's not as "hackable" as they probably intended.