top | item 22225863

(no title)

eholk | 6 years ago

> - 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.

discuss

order

No comments yet.