Yes, I also found the idea of tangling with GCC (or even llvm) less than appealing. It's not the initial work that puts me off, but the ongoing maintenance cost. For my own project (EightThirtyTwo) I ended up writing a backend for the VBCC C compiler. The downsides are (a) no C++ support, and (b) an unusual license - but the upsides were (a) a build process that takes seconds, not hours, (b) a simple generic RISC backend one can use as a starting point, and (c) a compiler lightweight enough that it could be self-hosting. (I can compile C code for EightThirtyTwo using an Amiga!)
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Yes, I also found the idea of tangling with GCC (or even llvm) less than appealing. It's not the initial work that puts me off, but the ongoing maintenance cost. For my own project (EightThirtyTwo) I ended up writing a backend for the VBCC C compiler. The downsides are (a) no C++ support, and (b) an unusual license - but the upsides were (a) a build process that takes seconds, not hours, (b) a simple generic RISC backend one can use as a starting point, and (c) a compiler lightweight enough that it could be self-hosting. (I can compile C code for EightThirtyTwo using an Amiga!)