I worked on a Sea of Nodes compiler [0] myself and "backwards data flow analysis and control flow sensitive analysis" has never been a problem. Changes to the

I worked on a Sea of Nodes compiler [0] myself and "backwards data flow analysis and control flow sensitive analysis" has never been a problem. Changes to the CFG are hard because of the Phi nodes, which have to be adapted in lockstep with CFG changes. However, this is probably inherent to SSA form, but not sea of nodes. You want a good graph visualization instead of text-based output, because you should actually to see the "non-order of the sea". Text-output with an implicit order can hide issues. Personally, I believe sea of nodes is better then others, like SSA form is better than non-SSA. There is nothing which makes it inherently more powerful, but it feels more elegant. Unfortunately, there is no objective comparison and anecdotes are apples vs oranges. Similarly, how would you compare object-oriented with functional programming? [0] http://libfirm.org http://libfirm.org