I came here to say exactly the same thing. There are also a couple of other options: the MIR project from RedHat [1], libjit [2], lightning [3] and Dynasm [4] 1

I came here to say exactly the same thing. There are also a couple of other options: the MIR project from RedHat [1], libjit [2], lightning [3] and Dynasm [4] 1. https://github.com/vnmakarov/mir https://github.com/vnmakarov/mir 2. https://www.gnu.org/software/libjit/ https://www.gnu.org/software/libjit/ 3. https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/manual/lightning.html https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/manual/lightning.html 4. https://corsix.github.io/dynasm-doc/tutorial.html https://corsix.github.io/dynasm-doc/tutorial.html But in general it seems to be very hard to beat the bang for buck from generating C and compiling that - even with something simple like tcc