I came across the article in another thread [1], and found the idea very interesting that Static Single Assignment (SSA) as an optimization can be viewed as an intermediate language that is functional.

In other words, a language such as Go or Rust that optimizes a program into SSA form sort of turns itself into a functional language in the process, and lessons learned from functional languages can be applied here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799434