[kibwen]

> Instead it uses the target platform's C compiler, which is a lot less work but has basically no downsides.

The downsides of leveraging a platform's given C compiler as your backend is that now you'll be spending a large chunk of time learning the hard way about all the various incompatibilities in C compilers, and adding workarounds in your frontend for the otherwise-unpatchable behavior encountered in every old version of every major compiler on every platform you wish to support.

Conversely, the advantage of using a single known backend is that you can automatically know what code your users are running when they submit a bug report, and you can fork and ship the patch yourself rather than trying to convince an upstream C compiler to accept the patch, then convince the upstream distro to ship the new version of the compiler, then convincing all your users to update their platform C compiler.

Walter Bright concurs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16195031

Kit may have an easier time of it if it's intended only for games, since that narrows down its supported target platforms substantially. The harsh truth is that most game devs only care about one platform (Windows) and one toolchain (MSVC), so at least it can tailor its output to appease MSVC specifically.

[rurban]

No, I'm targetting C89 (because of msvc) and there almost no platform quirks than some line length limit on msvc. c99 would be nicer of course.

[Rusky]

Most game devs also care about consoles, which adds several more platforms and toolchains.