Nim's ORC - Vorsprung durch Algorithmen

[Max Haughton]

On Tuesday, 2 February 2021 at 11:14:24 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 February 2021 at 08:11:03 UTC, Max Haughton wrote:
>> HOWEVER - all of these changes effectively mean bolting even 
>> more flow analysis to the compiler which isn't great given the 
>> current coding styles in dmd (It's very "flat" i.e. not much 
>> abstraction, and there is a tendency to dump everything in one 
>> 10k line file) - this is an easily solvable problem, we just 
>> need to be more forward thinking.
>
> There is a need for a new typed intermediate representation 
> that is higher level than the LLVM IR.
>
> One problem is that D allows directly emitting low level 
> constructs.
>
> One way to deal with this is to require all low level code to 
> have a high level counterpart with a version selector.

I'm not convinced that an IR is needed as much as a clearly 
defined pipeline for the AST as it goes through the compiler, 
e.g. trying to organise code into passes, at least locally.