[bigyabai]

> it always has been and always will be available everywhere

"Always has been" is pushing it. Half of C's history is written with outdated, proprietary compilers that died alongside their architecture. It's easy to take modern tech like LLVM for granted.

[baq]

This might actually be a solved problem soonish, LLMs are unreasonably effective at writing compilers and C is designed to be easy to write a compiler for, which also helps. I don’t know if anyone tried, but there’s been related work posted here on HN recently: a revived Java compiler and the N64 decompilation project. Mashed together you can almost expect to be able to generate C compilers for obscure architectures on demand given just some docs and binary firmware dumps.

[bigyabai]

Which is neat! But if you care about performance, you're probably using Clang to compile for your esoteric architecture. And if your esoarch already supports LLVM... might as well write Rust instead.

[qwm]

Unreasonably good at writing compilers? Not in my experience lol.