Windows support is huge. One of the barriers to me considering QBE for a project in recent memory was that it had no story for proprietary OSes (Windows, MacOS), and whether I like it or not, those make up the overwhelming majority of desktop-like market share. (this is the same reason I find Hare, a language that builds with QBE, interesting but not practical for my own uses - targeting only Linux and the BSDs is a non-starter, even if I personally am a Linux-only guy)

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kreelman 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The Blaise Pascal compiler uses QBE for it's backend compiler.

https://github.com/graemeg/blaise

Having Blaise work on Windows, could be interesting... Though of course only in the long tail of already built Delphi apps... that still have source.... that are reasonably written... that don't rely on now unsupported libraries...

Hmmm... Ah yes. These may be some of the reasons people might not do Delphi as much anymore. Still, Delphi was great for me and helped me get a mortgage and things like that.

The Blaise author is progressing his development along nicely using QBE for the compiler. To me, Blaise looks like a team progressing things nicely, but I think it's mostly the original author.

Blaise could be a neat Pascal compiler with a great deal of old cruft cleaned out and is quite quick.

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Imustaskforhelp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree!

One of the benefits of this new QBE feature of supporting windows could be that this allows a language like Hare to be used for windows too, all the more power to Hare and other programming languages built on top of QBE!

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packetlost 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In theory, sure, but there's no way Hare is going to ever officially support Windows. Even if the compiled backend supports the target, the language still needs to abstract over the OS interfaces and implement syscalls.

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avadodin 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not familiar with the language but if it targets libc, it might be easily able to work with MINGW. There are mingw/native versions of most popular libraries.

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torginus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The whole point of Hare is to be a part of a modern computing environment that offers most of the creature comforts of modern computing, yet is small enough to be understood by one person.

	▲	avadodin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This doesn't clarify much. The Linux kernel ABI, while stable, is not simpler than libc and not portable at all. You can build the modern computing environment on mingw. However, if they chose to target Linux–only to show how low–level Hare is, that's understandable as well —no shade. To take it to its logical conclusion, they're saying libc will be a package you install on your Hare/Linux system for compatibility with obsolete systems, which to me implies willingness to work on ports to other platforms —you're not going to replace libc otherwise.