Comment by kragen

2 days ago

It won't surprise you to learn that I'm always interested in hearing about alternatives to QBE, but from the documentation, libfirm sounds more like a heavyweight alternative to LLVM, not a lightweight alternative to QBE. How big is it?

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kragen

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sitkack  1 day ago

9x larger in LoC, 50x larger in comments.

I had a wall of supporting tokei but decided against it, but the short of it is, LLVM is phenomenally massive, and libfirm at 135kloc and 35kloc of comments is but a raindrop that is in the 15Mloc+ that is LLVM.

Perhaps instead of looking towards libfirm, we should look at cranelift. It is of comparable size and actually includes 12kloc of documentation, not just comments.

https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/tree/main/crane...

  • kragen  1 day ago

    If it's roughly an order of magnitude more complexity than QBE, it doesn't sound like an alternative, even if it's still two orders of magnitude smaller than LLVM.

    Cranelift has been looking interesting. Also, LuaJIT.