Depends if you mean a hobby/small C compiler or if you were trying to write something of similar scope to gcc or Watcom, say. If the latter, there have been big

Depends if you mean a hobby/small C compiler or if you were trying to write something of similar scope to gcc or Watcom, say. If the latter, there have been big developments in the optimization stages (not least due to CPU and architecture changes over the years) and the approach to targeting runtimes would be quite different (far less likely to target x86 directly nowadays when there are things like LLVM or even the CLR/JVM/similar). At the risk of sparking controversy, I think Go is a great example of "how would they do it now?" which goes further than compiler techniques and back to rethinking what the runtime should even be.