Re:A Simple Graph-Based Intermediate Representation (1995) [...
by eholk on Monday February 03, 2020 @11:43AM
(#22225863)
> - IRs need to be intuitive to the people who work on the compiler. Sea of nodes is more challenging to think about than SSA over CFG.
I worked on V8 for awhile, which uses a sea of nodes representation. This point really resonates with me. I and many of my teammates never completely developed an intuition for the different edges in the graph. There was a lot of trial and error involved.
I remember reading this paper and thinking "wow! this is the solution to all the problems I never knew I had." The generality and simplicity of a single graph that does everything is appealing. But in practice, I think you'd most often be better with SSA over CFG.
I worked on V8 for awhile, which uses a sea of nodes representation. This point really resonates with me. I and many of my teammates never completely developed an intuition for the different edges in the graph. There was a lot of trial and error involved.
I remember reading this paper and thinking "wow! this is the solution to all the problems I never knew I had." The generality and simplicity of a single graph that does everything is appealing. But in practice, I think you'd most often be better with SSA over CFG.