I can't seem to find the discussion now, but the C-- people (http://www.cminusminus.org/) found that compilation-to-C was a requirement from some large companies, at least as a backup path, for anything not solidly established. Companies wanted to know that if this fancy new thing's maintenance dropped off a cliff in 10 years, they could at least compile to C, and thereby leverage C compiler ports to new architectures, rather than depending on a straight-to-asm path that may or may not be maintained decades from now.