Is there a fundamental difference between copy and patch with C and what compilers do when they target intermediate representations? It seems to me that traditional compilation methods are also "copy and patch" but with another intermediate language than C.
I think conceptually, there is no real difference. In the end, a compiler outputting machine code uses very small stencils, like "mov _ _", which are rather simple to patch.
Practically though, it's an enormous difference, as the copy and patch approach re-uses the years of work going into clang / gcc supporting platforms, optimizations for different platforms and so on. The approach enables a much larger pool of people ("People capable of writing C" vs "People capable of writing assembly / machine code") to implement very decent JIT compilers.
The real difference is in the possible optimizations. If you consider the full scope of JIT compilation in for instance a web browser or the JVM, you could use copy and patch as a tier 0 compiler, and once really hot paths are identified, trigger a complete compiler with all the optimizer steps. Some optimizations are more complicated to implement with copy-patch, esp. if you can't use all the tricks described in the paper (for instance they use the ghccc calling convention to get a much finer register allocation, but from the documentation I don't think it's going to make it for PostgreSQL).
But as you say, yes, this enables people capable of writing C and reading assembly (or you have to be perfect and never have to go into gdb on your compiled code), and it makes the job so much faster and easier... Writing several machine code emitters is painful, and having the required optimization strategies for each ISA is quickly out of reach.
