I am also working on a compiler and need to decide on a backend soon. I currently plan to use C (clang) as IL in the first iteration, with the option to upgrade to LLVM IL later.
I wonder whether there is any easier alternative. I definitely need to start with a framework that takes text input, because everything else would be hard to integrate with the TypeScript-based interpreter of my language. And it needs to work with a runtime written in C. QBE looks nicer than LLVM's IL, but I wonder whether it would cause more trouble in the end.
Since this version of your language will never be used by thousands of users (if you ever hit sucess you’ll want to rewrite your compiler anyway) QBE is a lot simpler to use than LLVM. The main limitation is the limited set of target architecture, and probably the dlow development. In effect Linux AMD64 and ARM64 are the only well supported architectures. Also you may be able to compile to windows using mingw assembler.
