Development of the foundation of a programming language

[max haughton]

On Tuesday, 14 September 2021 at 05:06:01 UTC, Elronnd wrote:
> On Tuesday, 14 September 2021 at 03:24:45 UTC, max haughton 
> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 14 September 2021 at 03:19:46 UTC, Elronnd wrote:
>>> On Monday, 13 September 2021 at 11:40:10 UTC, max haughton 
>>> wrote:
>>>> The dragon book barely mentions SSA for example
>>>
>>> In fairness, dmd doesn't use SSA either
>>
>> That's not a good thing.
>
> No, but if the OP's goal is to contribute to dmd, learning SSA 
> wouldn't be very helpful beyond a general acclimation to 
> compiler arcana.
>
> (Unless they wish to add SSA to dmd--a worthy goal, but perhaps 
> not the best thing to start out with.)

The backend is not where our efforts should be going. There is 
way too much work that needs doing above it to motivate working 
on the backend. The backend's design for the most part is 
extremely simple just buried under 40 years of code.

Besides, there's more to life than dmd, everything else is SSA at 
least some point in compilation (i.e. GCC isn't SSA all the way 
down but GIMPLE is).