> Hasn't this always been the case with compilers in recent times? Yes. LLVM used SSA form earlier than GCC did, and it makes its intermediate representation m

> Hasn't this always been the case with compilers in recent times? Yes. LLVM used SSA form earlier than GCC did, and it makes its intermediate representation more accessible than GCC or other compilers. But the general idea of having a midend level IR for optimizations was not at all novel at the time that LLVM appeared. I think the point was mainly to emphasize the fact that LLVM IR allows more optimizations than the somewhat comparable IR of JVM bytecode.