[LLVMdev] [RFC] Resurrecting the C back-end

[Philipp Klaus Krause]

On 28.08.2012 14:08, Joshua Cranmer wrote:
> On 8/27/2012 9:57 PM, Hongbin Zheng wrote:
>> I think the C backend also allow people performing source-to-source
>> transform with LLVM (instead of Clang).
> 
> I do not believe that this would be the case nor that it should be a
> goal. Source-to-source transformation requires a lot of accurate
> information about the AST, and conversion to LLVM IR is way too lossy.
> Signedness, for example, is lost at IR generation, as is any pretense of
> machine independence.
> 

Why is it not possible to have the C backend emit machine-independent
code (i.e. C code that does not rely on implementation-defined behaviour)?

Philipp