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gobdovantoday at 7:31 AM1 replyview on HN

When you call LLVM IR a design failure, do you mean its semantic model (e.g., memory/UB), or its role as a cross-language contract? Is there a specific IR propert that prevents clean mapping from Oberon?


Replies

Rochustoday at 9:41 AM

Several historical design choices within the IR itself have created immense complexity, leading to unsound optimizations and severe compile-time bloat. It's not high-level enough so you e.g. don't have to care about ABI details, and it's not low-level enought to actually take care of those ABI details in a decent way. And it's a continuous moving target. You cannot implement something which then continus to work.