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Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers

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170 points signa11 | 1 comments | 27 Jul 24 03:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mananaysiempre ◴[27 Jul 24 12:49 UTC] No.41086240[source]▶
> Bril’s SSA form needs a full rework, probably including an actual language extension along the lines of MLIR’s basic block arguments.

The linked MLIR documentation, in turn, credits Swift for that idea, but the earliest occurrence of phis as continuation arguments I know is in MLton. It’d be interesting to know where this idea comes from initially, because standard phis really are incredibly awkward.

replies(2): >>41088787 #>>41089366 #
1. tomsmeding ◴[27 Jul 24 21:10 UTC] No.41089366[source]▶
I'm not sure if it's the first occcurrence of this idea, but one of the main ideas of "SSA is functional programming" by Andrew Appel in 1998 is almost precisely this: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ssafun.pdf (TL;DR: see the left column on page 2)