[cfe-dev] SSA form in Clang

[James Courtier-Dutton]

On 1 May 2015 at 10:58, Hayden Livingston <halivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> For my project (a subset of C) I'm trying to do optimizations at the
> source level language and wondering why Clang doesn't have an SSA form
> representation.
>
> Is it not useful, since LLVM does almost all the optimizations?

I am wondering why you would want to do that?
Source code should be optimized for readability and maintainability by
humans, and not necessarily optimized for performance.
LLVM does performance optimizations that would make the resulting C
source code much less readable.

Something called "re-factoring" is normally a useful thing to do at
the source code level, resulting in source code that is easier to
maintain.
Another area might be analyzing the source code and recognising areas
that can be multi-threaded, thus improving performance that way.
Analyzing the source code and identifying areas likely to cause deadlocks.
Essentially, useful things to check for that a compiler does not do.

Kind Regards

James