Without compiler extensions galore, no C is not that powerful. Until C11, you couldn't even control alignment without hacky union workarounds that weren't great

Without compiler extensions galore, no C is not that powerful. Until C11, you couldn't even control alignment without hacky union workarounds that weren't great. You simply can't model exotic integer types in C like you can in LLVM IR. You can't disable struct padding without a GNU extension. The variance and portability of libc is pretty annoying too; you'd be surprised how many GNUisms you thought were in the spec. But worst of all, C's integer behavior is extremely unintuitive and basically force you to use case every operand and every binOp result to ensure desired behavior in all cases. You totally could transpile to C, but you'll basically have to master the C spec & its edge cases, write everything out in single-static-assignment form with explicit casts everywhere, avoid most of libc, use at least C11, accept some shortcomings, and avoid using most C language constructs and basically write assembly in C. Either do all that, or you'll inherit some of the quirks and shortcomings of C (and have your C compiler misinterpret your code). And even then, it probably won't optimize that well. Please, just output LLVM IR or something.