Comment by asplake
2 years ago
“I want students to feel the pain of working with non-SSA programs before the course introduces SSA. This frustration can help motivate why SSA is the modern consensus.”
2 years ago
“I want students to feel the pain of working with non-SSA programs before the course introduces SSA. This frustration can help motivate why SSA is the modern consensus.”
In case anyone else believed this was scarcasm, it is not. It is a direct and accurate quote from the article. Bril is not (always) SSA.
Here is a follow-up quote from the article.
> Unfortunately, this aftermarket SSA retrofit has been a huge headache. [...] I think my original design is fundamentally flawed; it was a mistake to treat phi semantically as “just another instruction” [...]. Bril’s SSA form needs a full rework [...]. It has been an interesting lesson for me that SSA comes with subtle design implications that are difficult to retrofit onto an existing mutation-oriented IL.
I don't know enough to know what to make of this and the accompanying bug reports. Perhaps just "stay away from Bril SSA"?