compiler il-matching amd64 windows-abi position-independent-code

QBE 1.3 adds pattern matching, Windows ABI

New OCaml-generated instruction selector and 63% gcc-O2 performance on coremark; Windows ABI support via `-t amd64_win`.

July 1, 2026

Summary

Developers targeting QBE for production code now have measurable performance gains (33% improvement on Hare test suite) and cross-platform ABI support. Position-independent code support eliminates a blocker for shared object compilation.

Why it matters

Implementation verdict

Replaces QBE 1.2's tree-numbering instruction selection with metaprogrammed pattern matching via mgen. Requires recompilation; no API changes. Ready now—this is a stable release. Only gap: inlining remains unsupported (deferred for streaming compilation model).

Sources

1.around 7k new lines of code and 1.5k deleted ones
2.we decided to keep only a subset of vetted passes and now score more than 63% of the performance of commercial compilers on vanilla coremark
3.I measured a 33% improvement on the Hare test suite against qbe-1.2 (1.7s vs 2.6s)
4.A new OCaml tool called mgen is used to compile lispy IL patterns into idiomatic C code
5.Compiling for Windows is now as simple as passing -t amd64_win to QBE

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