I have a lot of thoughts about the design of compiler intermediate representations (IRs). In this post I’m going to try and communicate some of those ideas and why I think they are important. The overarching idea is being able to make decisions with only local information. That comes in a couple of different flavors. We’ll assume that we’re compiling a method at a time, instead of a something more trace-like (tracing, tracelets, basic block versioning, etc). Control-flow graphs A functi...
