Comment by 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...
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.
We agree on a lot of things, but QBE is off the table. Complexity and kloc are loosely correlated. Cranelift and libfirm are of equivalent size while Cranelift is in Rust and has wonderful compiler engineers working on it.
https://c9x.me/git/qbe.git/tree/rega.c
QBE is a one person performance art project.
This code looks a lot like the Unix V6 kernel code or the source code to Steve Johnson's pcc C compiler. It's indeed too sparsely commented, but it's not as bad as you made it sound.
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