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.)

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).