I agree with that. It is tempting to top it by saying C wasn't designed to do anything well and that has complicated things over the last 45 years. On the other

I agree with that. It is tempting to top it by saying C wasn't designed to do anything well and that has complicated things over the last 45 years. On the other hand it's not like there has been a traditional wealth of wonderful ready-made IRs with cross-architecture backends for your high level language to chose from either, so I'm still not convinced that compiling to C is harder than to do compile to machine code yourself, especially in the common case where you don't have to get the last ounce of possible performance out.