Therein lies the interesting design space, yeah. Control flow, data layout, semantics of basic blocks are sometimes target agnostic and sometimes not. Sometimes

Therein lies the interesting design space, yeah. Control flow, data layout, semantics of basic blocks are sometimes target agnostic and sometimes not. Sometimes a div instruction needs to turn into a runtime call, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you want explicit control of registers, sometimes any gpr is fine. Which I suppose yields the other language choice. Instead of C or assembly, write in something very like a compiler IR. Ymmv persuading non-compiler devs to code in SSA form directly.