Does compiling to C-- have any benefits compared to compiling equivalent C code (maybe a subset of C)? My guess would be modern C compilers, powered by decades of R&D and programming, would be able to optimize just as well and possibly better.

EDIT: One advantage that comes to my mind is that compiling to C-- will give slightly more power to deal with stack. E.g. implementing exceptions, continuations etc would be simpler. This is possible in C using inline assembly.