qbe mit Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, Nix, pacman, zypper installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• qbe

Projektgeschichte

QBE began around 2014 as a compact compiler-backend project. Its stated goal is to deliver much of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers with a fraction of their implementation size.

Development added amd64, arm64, and riscv64 targets, a simple SSA-based intermediate language, C ABI interoperability, optimization passes, register allocation, and tutorial material. QBE 1.0 arrived in 2022 after roughly eight years of repository development.

Adoptionsgeschichte

QBE has been adopted as a backend by language implementations including cproc, Hare, Antimony, and SCC. It is also used as compiler-course practice material, reflecting its value as a readable implementation as well as a production component.

The 1.0 release was made in response to requests from package maintainers and users, marking a transition from a rolling source project to a versioned package with all supported targets at parity.

Wie es verwendet wird

Language frontends emit QBE's textual intermediate language, run `qbe` to produce assembly, and use a platform C toolchain to assemble and link the result.

QBE is best suited to language implementers who value a compact, hackable backend, straightforward C calls, and fast compilation over the breadth of targets and optimization machinery offered by larger frameworks. It has no documented persistent configuration or credential files.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

QBE deliberately occupies the space between writing a bespoke backend and adopting a large compiler framework. Its small C codebase, uniform SSA-based intermediate language, full C ABI, and quick compilation make it attractive to new systems languages and compiler experimentation.

For package enthusiasts, QBE is a notable example of a compiler component whose constrained scope is the feature: it targets useful optimization and interoperability while remaining small enough to study, modify, and package easily.

Zeitleiste

• 2014: The QBE repository received its first commits, based on the official 1.0 retrospective.
• 2022: QBE 1.0 was released after eight years of development.
• 2023: QBE 1.1 added Apple arm64 support, TLS, and further optimization work.
• 2024: QBE 1.2 delivered correctness and documentation improvements.
• 2026: QBE 1.3 added Windows ABI support and improved position-independent-code support.

Related projects

• cproc is a self-hosting C11 frontend for QBE.
• Hare has used QBE as its backend from the language's beginning.
• LLVM is compared directly in QBE's official documentation as the larger industrial compiler infrastructure representing a different complexity and optimization tradeoff.

Quellen

• https://c9x.me/compile/
• https://c9x.me/compile/releases.html
• https://c9x.me/compile/users.html