&quot;you eliminate the necessity of serializing and deserializing your IR during your compilation pipeline for no reason (which is effectively what compiling and reparsing C is doing).&quot;<p>I did debugging <i>before</i> it got to C and just ensured C generation would do exactly what I wanted. I could read and debug the C itself as a check against problems in that. Yet, serializing and deserializing my IR just didn&#x27;t happen: it was just LISP or BASIC expressions depending on which version we&#x27;re talking about. Just tree&#x27;s.<p>You&#x27;re debugging regression claim is correct as I addressed in my main comment. Fortunately, my development style and choice of libraries compensated for that nicely. It would&#x27;ve been quite painful if I had to deal with arbitrary FOSS or proprietary stuff out of necessity. I&#x27;d be working at both abstraction levels for sure or coding miracles into my tooling haha.