Naive

MEP-42 Phase 1: Naive Backend Recommendation

One-paragraph recommendation, plus reasoning, for which naive-emission technique Mochi MEP-42 should adopt as the first cut.

QBE as a Naive-But-Good-Enough Backend

A 14k-LOC SSA compiler backend by Quentin Carbonneaux that targets x86-64, arm64, and riscv64 from a textual SSA IR. The "70% of LLVM in 10% of the code" pitch. The natural fallback if writing our own emitter feels too risky.

chibicc: A Minimal C Compiler as a Mochi Backend Reference

Rui Ueyama's ~10k LOC C compiler that emits x86-64 GAS assembly directly from a recursive-descent parser. The clearest published example of a single-pass codegen pipeline that produces correct code with no IR, no SSA, no register allocator. The right educational template for a "naive AOT" pass of MEP-42.

The Per-Opcode Template JIT Pattern

The general pattern that Sparkplug, Liftoff, JSC Baseline, and the HotSpot template interpreter all instantiate. Per-op native template, fixed register convention, stub calls for slow paths, optional inline caches as patchable code regions. Specifically considered here as an engineering implementation in pure Go without cgo.

Wasm Baseline Compilers: Liftoff, RabaldrMonkey, Winch

A converged design pattern across three independent implementations: per-opcode template emission, a virtual operand stack with lazy register promotion, no IR, no global optimization. The current state of the art in "fast and simple" Wasm code generation.

Classical Single-Pass Code Generation

Tree-walk to tuples to native assembly. The textbook recipe from the Dragon Book and Cooper/Torczon, still the right starting point when you want correctness before performance.

Copy-and-Patch Compilation

Stencil-driven code generation that harvests pre-compiled opcode snippets at build time and stitches them into native code at runtime via relocation patches. No IR, no register allocator, no instruction selector. The technique CPython 3.13+ ships in production.