> I can imagine having a lot of fun making a toy compiler that emits LLVM IR directly. Practically speaking, is there a good reason to do this in non-toy softwa

> I can imagine having a lot of fun making a toy compiler that emits LLVM IR directly. Practically speaking, is there a good reason to do this in non-toy software rather than the more-or-less standard practice of using C as an IR? Well what you're describing is the whole living purpose of LLVM as a compiler framework. In other words, clang, LDC, GHC, and all other LLVM front-end compilers are non-toy software that transform their respective language into IR and hand it to libLLVM* for optimization/codegen/etc. Targeting C puts a relatively large layer and potentially good deal of ambiguity in between your compiler and the machine code, rather it seems more fitting for experimental or "toy" software to use that in lieu of a real compiler or LLVM frontend.