miniblog.

Over a sufficiently long time horizon, all code you write is legacy code.

I would have thought that invoking a C compiler would be a solved problem. Looking at Rust's cc crate there's a remarkable long tail of corner cases to fix. Exotic CPUs, microarchitectures, compiler differences, operating system differences, etc. https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Bril is a cute intermediate language for teaching (think simplified LLVM IR): https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/bril.html The idea of providing a standard JSON format to help students write basic passes is really elegant.