Very cool. I think Wasm is a nice instruction set, but I agree that its structured control flow is a bit weird and also the lack of instructions to handle the memory stack. But it's much more cleaner than something like x86_64.

If you are interesting in learning in more detail how to write a C compiler, I highly recommend the book "Writing a C Compiler" by Nora Sandler [0]. This is a super detailed, incremental guide on how to write a C compiler. This also uses the traditional architecture of using multiple passes. It uses its own IR called Tacky and it even includes some optimization passes such as constant folding, copy propagation, dead code elimination, register allocation, etc. The book also implements much more features, including arrays, pointers, structs/unions, static variables, floating point, strings, linking to stdlib via System V ABI, and much more.

[0] https://norasandler.com/book/