> SSA stands for “static single assignment”, and was developed in the 80s as a way to enhance the existing three-argument code (where every statement is in the form x = y op z) so that every program was circuit-like, using a very similar procedure to the one described above.
I understand it's one of those "well if you don't know what it is, the post is not for you" but I think it's a nice article and could get people who are not familiar with the details interested in it
> The reason this works so well is because we took a function with mutation, and converted it into a combinatorial circuit, a type of digital logic circuit that has no state, and which is very easy to analyze.
That's an interesting insight, it made sense to me. I only dealt with SSA when decompiling bytecode or debugging compiler issues, and never knew why it was needed, but that sort of made it click.