QBE
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
7recommend
0warn against
Jan 3, 2026first mention
Oct 14, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“I personally went with QBE for my hobby project because of C-interop”
“I love QBE, but it does have its limitations”
Show 3 more
“QBE is a super simple project which is why adding a backend to it worked so well.”
“it's a great lightweight alternative to LLVM”
“QBE is a tiny project, but I think illustrates a better intermediate language design.”
Caveats and dissent
No one in these comments warned against it.
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
- QBE – Compiler Back end: Version 1.3 4 mentions
- QBE – Compiler Back End 3 mentions
- 11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker 1 mention
- Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress 1 mention
- Show HN: I wrote a flight simulator in my own programming language 1 mention
- Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE 1 mention
Data: qbe.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 14
“the cproc/qbe C compiler gets very roughly 50% of the performance of Clang/LLVM”
“That doesn't sound like QBE wants to compete with LLVM when it comes to optimizations.”
The Blaise Pascal compiler uses QBE for it's backend compiler. https://github.com/graemeg/blaise Having Blaise work on Windows, could be interesting... Though of course only in the long tail of already built Delphi apps... that still have source.... that are reasonably written... that don't rely on now unsupported libraries... Hmmm... Ah yes. These may be some of the reasons people might not do Delphi as much anymore
“I'd planned to use along-side qbe eventually”
“I personally went with QBE for my hobby project because of C-interop”
“QBE being a bit more friendly and well documented, with MIR making faster code”
“no one is writing QBE IR by hand”
“I love QBE, but it does have its limitations”
“It looks like it doesn't have native support for identifying GC roots”
“QBE is a super simple project which is why adding a backend to it worked so well.”
“it's a great lightweight alternative to LLVM”
“QBE is a tiny project, but I think illustrates a better intermediate language design.”
“QBE might be more to your liking”
“it is radically simpler and easier to use”