While he mentions the slowness of LLVM, it would have been cool to see Jamie's thoughts on tinycc and qbe as well. I've been looking into the fastest options for generating and executing machine code (without me doing it all myself; generating and compiling C feels like a happy medium).
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
2. https://www.gnu.org/software/libjit/
3. https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/manual/lightning.html
4. 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